Roadkill

A group wearing hi-vis vests gathered on a grassy hillock beside the busy M25 were looking uncertain. Faltering even, as they looked upon their brave and fearless commander. Courage and fearlessness being relative, in this case his courage and fearlessness just about exceeding that of a fat 14-year-old high-school bully. Encircled among his devoted followers he began rambling about the plan. The Plan. Of course, they had discussed it the night before, but a last minute regroup before things kick into gear is always useful, especially with the battlefield under your feet.

“We’ve been through this already.”

A melange of facial expressions, some saying “What the fuck is he talking about”, others saying “I vaguely remember but I zoned out” and a good bunch of them with the wild-eyed fanatical zeal conveying that they were riding elegantly on every word that flowed out of his mouth.

“On the count of three we jump over the barrier and run out onto the road.” Pointing towards the blistering blur of traffic that’s shooting past them like one undisturbed mass of chrome-coloured speed, saying that last bit like it’s the most reasonable thing to come out of a sane person’s mouth. “It’s simple really. I don’t see why I have to go over this again.”

The eyes of his acolytes follow the path of his finger, out onto the motorway. Heavy gulps of consternation emerge from throats as some try to swallow their Adam’s apples. While from others, who were either born without any self-preservation or through years of carelessness and thrill-seeking have zapped out that one vital neural pathway with ensures that feeling of wanting to keep yourself alive actually registers in the brain, come cheers of demented determination. The excitement is so much for them that they can’t control the drool slipping like a silver string from the side of their mouths, glistening in the late-morning sun.

“Get ready everyone! This is the big moment we’ve been waiting for.” The commander unzips his bag and starts handing everyone red and blue flags.

“3…2……”

Flags are being clutched tightly by tremulous hands.

“…..1!”

Like a gun going off that no one heard, everyone hops over the fence like soldiers going over the top of a trench and spill out onto the dense undulating highway, amidst a sea of moving cars.

The doppler of cars zooming past immediately cuts into a discordant cacophony of loud blaring klaxons, like a cat running over the keys of a piano which produce the most ear-splitting scream of a horn from every car possible, and the towering whine of screeching tyres as they come to a burning halt.

Then like a gross flower emerging from shit-soil, the whole thing blossomed into something ugly.

It was a Monday afternoon on the 20th of September when I was on my way to work. I had just finished reading The Age of Reason and had run out of reading material for my journey to work when I picked up a copy of that day’s Evening Standard all crumpled up and folded on a seat just an arm’s length from mine. I was quite bored and left in a state of existential dissociation, so this newspaper was a serendipitous find because I desperately needed something to bring me back down to this planet or else I’d be floating in a magnificent cloud of random thoughts for the rest of the evening.

A cursory flick of the pages landed me on a small story barely taking up half a page, bearing a title with such absurdity that I was already half a paragraph in before the headline finished its passage through my eyes.

Activists glue themselves to road in fourth protest on M25

“What in the screaming fuck?” I say while chuckling and tossing the paper aside after reading it, satisfied that what I read was enough idiocy to slide me back into the normalcy of planet Earth.

It wasn’t until the story germinated in the next day’s papers that I began to sniff some potential. Potent dizzying stupidity. A failure of reason, and from the vacuum coming forth some of that beautifully surreal nonsense that I yearn for on this rock. People running out into oncoming traffic, gluing themselves onto the road and sitting right in the middle of the busiest motorway in London, spilling paint onto it and screaming some half-constructed demand that the government should insulate all the homes in Britain by 2030, right before the police drag them off the road only for them to run right back onto it again.

A spectacular scene as far as my wobbly imagination can conjure up, but I don’t have to, because these fuckers are doing it all for me. It’s taken care of itself already; all I have to do is type up this gibberish and deliver the facts. Oh yes, the facts. That word which every self-respecting journalist worships like an idol of black gold. Good thing I have no use for false idols.

Part I. Scrape Their Remains Off the Road.

It’s hard to concentrate and tell a story straight when such rich music is filling the air and taking over you but I’ll do my best.

Those nigh-suicidal freaks that are throwing themselves onto the highway like a stop sign on legs are with a group that go by the rather unimaginative name of Insulate Britain, and they have one goal and one only, to get the British government to insulate all social housing in the country insulated by 2025 and then the rest of them by 2030.

Their wording and demeanour suggest that they want to put it on the government’s tab, which by proxy means the taxpayers tab. Drop all responsibility of this task on the big-wigs in the government, maybe if you push them enough they’ll yield.

Their motivations are environmental and humanitarian. Insulated houses mean less heating required which in turn means less carbon emissions. And that comes with the added benefit of the destitute not freezing to death in the winter. Then that rolls onto their secondary demand, though not in any way inferior to the first, no sir, to decarbonise all parts of society and the economy by 2030. Sounds like a reasonable thing to me. Makes me want to shoot out of my chair and shout one great Hallelujah! How are they going about doing that, however? Rolling the dice on their own lives and throwing themselves into oncoming traffic on the busiest artery that keeps the blood flowing in and out of London, then sitting down and getting in the way like some fatal blood clot.

Their protests have been targeting the M25 which is this behemoth of an orbital motorway encircling the entirety of Greater London like a ring of fantastic asphalt. If you want to get in or out of London by road, you go through there.

It doesn’t take more than half a thought to drag out the inane foolishness of their endeavour into the naked light.

Firstly, blocking a busy motorway and the insulation of houses has absolutely nothing in common to suggest what the group is protesting for. There’s no symbolism to their actions. From a distance one would take these fools for crazed protestors who are taking their disgruntlement out on the transport system or some other sector that handles the roadworks.

Secondly, it seems the backhanded effects of their actions have completely eluded them, because thousands of cars piled up, bumper to bumper, on top of each other sputtering smoke into the air while a bunch of clowns block their passage goes completely against their cursed prohibition of carbon emissions. Thirdly, as I’ve already no doubt mentioned that they want to drop the bill for insulation on the governments tab, which means that it’ll partly out of the treasury and largely out of taxpayer money. It sounds like they haven’t asked themselves the question that if people could afford to insulate their own homes, wouldn’t they have done that already? What they’re after here is making people who can’t afford to insulate their own homes, pay taxes to insulate other people’s homes. And what, will someone else skip out on insulating their home so they can pay for the sucker who is already paying to insulate someone else’s? I can imagine this cycle play out for a very long time until we land on the poor bastard who doesn’t get his house insulated because he spent his taxes on the one who came before him. No more tax to go around I’m afraid, now if you’ll kindly freeze to death that would be great so we can demolish your home to make way for a lemonade stand.

Already some prima facie evidence that what we’re dealing with here isn’t a group of people who have put much thought in their scheme. A cavalcade of amateurs who have managed to get their foot into the door of something big. But hey, I should probably give them the benefit of the doubt, right? Maybe there’s more to them than their pea-brained exterior. I’d wish that were the truth, but the more this story unfurls, the louder the horrendous call of the straight jacket and padded cell for them becomes. 

This circus rolled into town on September 13th. Their first protest on this stretch of road begins with small fry, blocking off junctions which lead onto the main nerve of the stream itself. They decide to go for junctions 3, 6, 14, 20, and 21. Their routine has become quite familiar by now; run into traffic, stop them, sit down, hold up your red and blue “Insulate Britain” flag and start screaming. Bonus points for those who spill red and blue paint onto the road.

I feel truly sorry for the poor bastard who pulls the short straw and has to clean up the paint from the road. They’d have to wait until the road is empty at night and jump out of the way of oncoming midnight drivers while they wash off the paint with high-pressured water hoses that would blast a clean hole in anyone within reach, or they’d have to close that part of the highway down to clean it up – but that seems unlikely with the traffic that rolls on that road day and night. Maybe we’ll just have to live with scars these assholes have left on that sacred road. Possibly the only bit of planning they’ve done, which seems pretty inadvertent.

On September 17th came the second one where they block off junctions 3, 9 and 28.

Continuing this nuisance on September 20th their demonstrations clog up junction 28 of the M25 and junction 4 of the A1(M) – another major motorway which leads out of London and connects to a huge length of road taking motorists all the way up to Edinburgh.

The police quickly take notice of this and head down there. Seeing this sordid sight of people in high-vis vests sitting around on a paint splattered motorway and manifesting themselves into a migraine for the rest of the people was enough to shake them into action and start dragging these idiots off the road. Officers walk up to the protestors and look down at them.

“Just what do you think you’re doing here?”

“This doesn’t concern you! We’re saving the planet here. Many will die if you stop us.” Says one bedraggled looking youth with rectangular glasses and huge protruding teeth.

“Do you see all the mess you’re making here son?” asks the officer in an almost genial tone.

“Can’t you see the mess the government has left for us to clean up?” growls the young man, glasses slipping down his nose.

“Alright that’s enough of that, come with me. People need to get to work.”

“NO!”

“Listen mate. You can either come with me yourself or I can take you with me.”

A blank and obstinate face looks back at the officer with determination.

With no other avenue out of here, the officer lays a hand on the young protestor and begins to drag him off. “NO!” he screams again, his scream turning into a wild whine and a cry as his body goes limp under the hands of the policeman dragging him across the width of the highway back onto the grassy side.

“People will die because of you!” cries the protestor as the officer drops him on the grass.

Ignoring this madman’s babbling, the policemen turns around to drag the others off the road but on his way there he sees a lime green blur swish past him which ends in the shape of the very same body he just dragged off the highway sitting back down defiantly in front of the officer.

At this point the policeman really wished he had a service issue gun on him which he could wave around and even crack off a few shots in the air to disperse this crowd, but all he had on his belt was a walkie talkie. Three is better than one he thinks and calls for more officers. With more hands-on deck, they begin dragging these fools off the highway, once by their arms, then by their heels after they run back and assume their places and then by their necks and into the back of their car for those defiant enough to test their patience. At the end of it all they finally cleared the highway with a bunch of arrests made and the traffic flowing freely again but with a sickening lurch of anger with all the time lost out of these peoples lives.

Feeling confident and not at all deterred by the peevishness of the police, they up the ante and swing the knife straight for the femoral artery, blocking the main carriageway of the M25 in both directions between junction 9 and 10.

Traffic begins to build, the air oscillates with the sound of horns and the global temperature rises by 0.01 degrees from the combined rage of the drivers stuck in traffic. A hellish scene straight out of Inferno is bought to a tempering display while these fools parade themselves in the middle of the M25 and shout their gibberish to angry motorists who care little for the words coming out of their mouths. Once the word reaches the authorities, they feel insulted. This is an affront too flagrant to ignore. They band up and drive immediately down to the site of the clot. This time they’re no longer asking protestors nicely to make themselves scarce, but are demanding and if the words don’t get through, they scrape them off the asphalt and hurl them in the back with cuffs on their hands. 38 people are arrested for charges ranging from criminal damage, public nuisance, wilful obstruction of the highway to causing danger to motorists.

People change when they’re behind the wheel. It’s not obvious at first and the effects only show themselves once powerful emotions like anger or lust take over. Something about driving, perhaps the feel of the steering wheel, the sense of control over this oversized bullet which can achieve high speeds on long stretches of road, or maybe just the precarity of life hanging on the edge of a freak accident that could occur at any moment, which turns these potent emotions into something violent and aggressive.

All it takes is something as brief as a careless driver swerving past you or a foolish pedestrian who runs across the road for the senses of the driver to be shanghaied by rage and excitement. Sharp abuse from the foulest pits of the driver’s language is screamed forth at this fucking cunt who shouldn’t be allowed on the road in the first place, while the swear canon of a driver begins punching his horn and kicking the brake pedal sending the car into the same spasms of apoplexy. And no more than a moment later it’s all over. It’s all forgotten about and they continue as if the sheer surge of rage burnt all memory of this hideous incident to a crisp. A truly marvellous sight it is to be in the passenger seat next to a driver who is in the throes of road rage. If we still lived in simpler times, we’d just blame this behaviour on abrupt possession by some sort of vengeful spirit who is the personification of all who have met their end under the wheels of a car.

Now imagine a motorist is driving down the M25, on their way someplace, in a hurry, some preoccupation waiting for them. The further down the motorway they drive, the denser the traffic becomes and that faint discordant rhythm of honking horns becomes louder. Before long there is no more movement, no more space. The hood of the car right up against the bumper of the one in front, like a long line of dogs sniffing each other’s asses. Perplexity takes over the mind as no cogent thought can get through this disorienting noise that’s pounding like a sledgehammer against the wall right outside the car. Fingers start drumming the steering wheel, feet tap faster and faster upon the floor matt with the engine still running in the hopes that this traffic jam will clear any minute now… any minute we’ll be moving again… what the fuck is taking so long? “I’m supposed to be at the office in 5 minutes, that bastard of a manager will fire me for sure if I’m late again this week.” Confusion turns into impatience into fear and then into rage. A nightmare indeed. With red mist in front of the eyes and hair singed at the ends, they roll down the window to make some sense of what’s happening here. This messy procession of twisted metal continues on for about a mile down the road, compacted into a singularity right at the very front with a clearing of people milling around right in front of it. The motorist looks right to grab the attention of an equally exasperated looking driver with their head in their hands.

“What the hell is happening up there?” our eyes in this horrid scenario asks.

“Some sort of fucking protest. I thought it was an accident or the road was closed but I walked up there a while ago and it’s just a bunch of cunts chanting and laying down in the road.” The guy seems to reignite with anger at the grim recollection of the reason they’re trapped there.

“What?!” The timbre of his growl said more than the word.

Taking matters into his own hands against odds too great for him, he gets out of his car and sets out on a stroll through the line of cars, across this pressure cooker of madness.

He is among the many people who have abandoned their cars in a prolonged attack of road rage to go have a few stiff words with the bastards who are responsible for this.

One motorist summed it up quite well in a way that flew in the face of the very purpose their time was being wasted for, “You’re causing more pollution with these cars sitting here doing fuck all.”

One of the protests on the M25 blocked a junction on the way to Stanstead Airport. Nothing gets people in a frenzied hurry like a plane to catch. Families whistling down the motorway, constantly glancing at their watch to see whether they have enough time to get through security and sprint towards the terminal when all of a sudden, they have to pull the breaks in the midst of a violent traffic jam because some hi-vis vest wearing waterheads have decided to take a nap on the road. I can imagine myself possessed by the most virulent sort of anger and I’ll end up doing or saying things too hideous for print.

Worse than that are the people who missed urgent doctors and hospital appointments, vital lifesaving ones which they’ve waited months for through a healthcare system under tremendous pressure due to COVID. A certain maddening scene was captured on LBC News – a local news radio station – of an interview with one of the Insulate Britain organisers after their third protest which took place on September 20th.

The host Andrew Pierce is not hiding his indignation one bit against the bespectacled, porridge faced lady of middle-age called Tracey Mallaghan.

He reveals to her that many people were unable to make it to their cancer and dialysis appointments which they’ve waited for months to secure and will have to wait an even longer time before the next slot opens up for them, in a voice which sounds like that she should be thankful they’re conversing over a video call or else he would’ve reached over the desk and strangled her. In a very vehement interrogative, he asks if she feels at all guilty about this. Her reaction is as much as one can expect from someone who’s been handed their torn-up ass to them in an interview.

Her head bobs back and forth in affirmative and she finally utters a word and says that she indeed is very heartbroken. She doesn’t even get to finish her pathetic reply before Andrew Pierce hits her with the backhand of, “Clearly you don’t feel guilty enough to stop what you’re doing.” Then he asks her a question which she is completely unable to reply to, “What would you do if it was your mother who missed a health appointment?” At this point Tracey descends into a shaking babble about some nonsense to do with “the bigger picture” and how “thousands of people die every year because they have to choose between heating and eating.”

The clip ended at that point and I’m all the more thankful for it because it started to give me a dizzying headache. Such inane nonsense coming out of the mouth of someone is too much for me to endure. For an environment group who are protesting for the government to change their ways in order to preserve the planet, these weird fuckers have a strangely solipsistic way of operating.

Let’s hold Tracey’s parting words to a bit of scrutiny, shall we? What “bigger picture” is she jabbering about? The planet? Sure. But those who are dying, those who must live from one day to the next, walking in and out of doctor’s appointments and therapy, living on borrowed time, uncomfortably close to the darkness, there is no such thing as the bigger picture. Everyone is too afraid of their own death, especially when it’s hanging over you, to care about anything outside of that. After enough exhaustion or acceptance, whichever one comes first, one something close to peace with it and disappear from the universe.

The manner in which Tracey composed herself when swung with a question she couldn’t evade is quite characteristic of other Insulate Britain organisers and spokespeople, as will become clear in this preternatural display of idiocy when we deal with more of them later on.

Their ears refuse to carry the vibrations of that question to their brain and tune it out completely. Their answers emerge in tentative utterances in response to that seems almost as if they’re answering a completely different question that no one asked or heard. And if not dodging the question completely, they’ll only half answer it – which is still not at all – by bringing up something that’s only vaguely related to what they were asked, in such a tenuous way that no perpendiculars can be drawn between.

Part II. Guilty By Association. “The Unhallowed Horror…” They’re Listening but They Just Don’t Care Brother.

Every newspaper and online article which ran the Insulate Britain story in those early days of this wretched phenomenon, never failed to mention that this group is “an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion”. Even after they had made that point, they kept on drawing that connection between Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain rather obsessively. This almost sounds like they’re implicitly saying, “Remember those pain in the backsides? These new pain in the backsides actually crawled out of the same scum-ridden hole those guys did.”

Because it’s no secret that Extinction Rebellion aren’t held in high regard. They are a walking embarrassment on the act of protesting and the only reason they are still alive and going is through the same tenacity found in a cockroach. Oh Jesus. Maybe that was a bit too far, I mean surely publicly denouncing environmentalist groups and comparing them to insects will brand me as a bastard who doesn’t care about the planet wouldn’t it? But perhaps I wouldn’t be put in such a position if they actually did their job properly, because from where I’m standing the pace of their progress has slowed down theatrically and all they ever achieve through one of those circuses they call a protest is souring the air with bad noise, getting drunk and then eventually arrested.

It might be of some interest to shed a cursory light upon Extinction Rebellion before we continue whatever this ramble can be classed as on Insulate Britain. Because they are after all an offshoot of them and the newspapers haven’t been saving any ink to remind us of that fact.

Extinction Rebellion or (XR) call themselves an “international movement that uses non-violent civil disobedience in an attempt to halt mass extinction and minimise the risk of social collapse.” Then they go on to describe a scene of the world that sounds like it’s straight out of the pages of some Lovecraft, “The third world-war of profit versus life is already underway. Humanity itself is on the brink of the abyss: our potential extinction. We face the breakdown of all life, the tragedy of tragedies; the unhallowed horror.”

I must admit that last bit really got me, and I’ve never really laughed at Lovecraftian language before which was an odd sensation. The thing that stings the most is that they’re right. So is Insulate Britain for that matter.

Both of these groups are absolutely correct that the world is in shambles and it needs fixing and that our governments are in the hands of greedy, pig-headed fascists who will sell their own grandmothers for a cheese sandwich. Their reaction is completely reasonable to the ignorance towards climate change most of the politicians are displaying and they’ve hit the nail right on the head when it comes to that untraversable void between the rich and the poor which grows day by day, eating away at the very substance of society until the poor are pretty much wiped off the face of the Earth through one means or another.

Power is in the hands of the unprincipled who think this planet and all its resources will just eventually replenish themselves for them to go at this ravaging all over again. I’m totally behind everything they stand for and agree with everything they’re protesting against. What completely kills it for me is their petulance and carelessness when they actually hit the streets. They describe their exploits on their website in such a way that it makes them sound like they initiate ground-breaking discourses between the public and the government, a linguistic flourish here and there to disguise the true nature of how things go down out there.

If there’s ever an XR protest going on around you, you should really take some time out to go watch one of them. Maybe drop some acid too while you’re there. I have never seen such a disorganised swivet of colour and hair before. They swing their lurid signs around like battle-axes and stumble through the streets in one lurching mass as the booze takes firm hold of their minds and when things eventually turn ugly, when the non-violent civil disobedience turns into public indecency, the police intervene and start cuffing people. Or maybe forget the acid, because such a scene is heavy enough to witness with one’s sober eyes.

With the amount of people that end up getting pulled off the street and arrested, it’s almost as if they’re trying to. Which they are. Their mission statements warns that arrests are inevitable. They’re just lucky enough that getting cuffed up during a protest doesn’t carry a mark on your criminal record, unless you end up attacking someone with a bike lock and get charged for grievous bodily harm, but that’s a completely different story.

Just like any self-respecting group of anarchists worth their salt, they are simmering with contempt for all the social, political and economic power structures and the evil which is flowing underneath it. All they’re missing is a bit of direction.

They identify a problem, gather in a frenetic horde while they get completely sideways on drink and drugs while chanting some unintelligible bullshit about their demands right before they get arrested.

Why do they keep doing it though? What sort of persistence is keeping them going? The basic yet integral assumption that any group who are protesting against “the system” or “the establishment” or “the government” hold is that the people in power are actually listening to them. Why else would they come out here if they knew they were screaming into the void? They are operating on a blind sort of faith that with enough noise and movement, they’ll get these influential people, sat in their comfy leather chairs up in the higher ranks of the government to actually do something. They’ve already hedged their bets on the fact that the leaders are listening, all they need to do now is create enough movement to jostle them out of their avaricious profit-oriented ways and weigh the political demands of the activist against their own political realities to realise just how out of sync “the system” and the people who were told the system would protect them have become. These politicians wield pens that have enough power in them to set radical change in motion with a single stroke, so why not whip them into action eh?

It’s a truly romantic and almost reductive way of putting it, but it’s the truth. Politicians can’t ignore the realities of protests going on right outside their doors. And there’s enough press and people with bizarre tastes of strange circumstances who will ride into the wind of these demonstrations to create a story which will eventually reach someone in the government. Then it’s just a case of word of mouth. Hold on, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here, and only a jackass does that. We’re omitting out the fact that though the politicians are listening, they don’t really care. A bomb set off by radical extremist activists will surely get their attention for a few days but then they’ll immediately be branded as terrorists and we know exactly what happens to terrorists in these parts. On the other hand, a group of activists hold a peaceful protest, all organised and handled under the watchful gaze of the authorities, and nothing truly noteworthy happens. No one notices the faint blip on the radar that might have just been a graphics glitch.

What about the middle of the road then? The place where compromises are met and deals are sealed? A group of activists might hold a loud and vociferous protest, parading through the streets and chanting for a cause that is well within the bounds of a reasonable ask. Some damage to property is done, some arrests are made, but that’s to be expected when a crowd this massive gather together. You don’t blame a tornado for uprooting a town, it’s just in its nature. Then the government immediately condemns these people for being careless and wasting everyone’s time, ultimately chasing the attention away from the real reason they were out there in the first place.

One of the most painful instances of ignorant obstinacy occurred in Poland right after the government passed the law declaring abortions illegal on October 22nd 2020. Abortion has never really been an easy thing to acquire in Poland, a country so deeply entrenched in its backwards Roman Catholic values, and the laws surrounding it have always tightened or loosened. But this particular ban was one of the most extreme ones.

The wave of anger and repugnance which rippled through the vast population of the country was like star-matter being ejected outwards from a supernova. Large throngs of people cheated out of their human rights took to the streets and began protesting. This wave reached a crest in the capital of Warsaw on October 30th where the largest and most seemingly catalytic demonstration took place. Over 100,000 people spilled out into the streets with signs saying “I wish I could abort my government”.

I returned to the UK from Poland just a day before that happened. Had I stayed for an extra day, I would’ve been waving a sign just like that at my second protest in Poland in under a week. I saw these fantastic pictures of a sea of people in Warsaw, undulating like an ocean of righteousness and anger, thinking to myself, “I hope this actually makes a difference.” I knew in my mind the fascist airheads in the Polish government wouldn’t turn back on their decision, but I saw a glimmer of hope from the magnitude of this protest. A fuck-up so massive from the government, pulling such a large crowd was bound to grab their attention and hopefully even recant this bill.

But lo and behold, abortion is still illegal in Poland to this day.

They listened, they even pretended to pay attention, but they just didn’t care.

I realise I’ve gone astray, succumbing to the powerful influences of a tangent. Even my girlfriend pointed it out just now as I was reciting every word I typed up, “How did you go from road protestors to abortion?” That’s when it occurred to me that I’ve ended up in a very different neck of the woods. I allowed myself this however, because I feel like it illustrates a point. One of obdurate blindness, a situation where politicians in power symbolically gouge out their own eyes so they can plead ignorance to the state of the people.

Bleeding Christ I’m starting to sound like an unhinged backseat revolutionary here, singing horrid ballads about how the powers that be don’t care for us and that we should stand up and dosomething about it. Well, I’m sorry to break to you to brother, but that’s ancient news now. It’s the way the planet spins and until we can come up with something truly effective to shake up whatever rusty foundations this society is standing upon, it’s best if we just make our peace with it for now and find whatever felicity we can in between.

I’ve spent time around enough anarchists to know when to let it go for a while. Come back when it’s hot.

My years spent living in Cardiff were around a whole community of anarchists who lived either on the wholesale rejection of society and on a lifestyle which closely resembles the hunter gatherers - coming back to the city every now and again out of necessity, because even the wilderness can drive you cuckoo sometimes – or those who only dropped certain parts of society and lived an alternative manner of life which both looks and feels like a cultural pick-n-mix box. Everything from their hair to their clothes, to the literature and media they absorbed reflected this action of walking away and only coming back when they had some grudge to release on a society they no longer call their own.

I’ve always known that I’d be existing on the fringes of the world myself, never will I get to taste what’s right at the core of it and neither do I have any desire for it. I enjoy the bitter fruits of being an outcast and have even fermented my own cellar of potent wines from them. I suppose that’s why I was able to fit into this group of crazies so easily.

Whenever there was an Extinction Rebellion protest rolling through town, you can put your money down on the fact that my anarchist acquaintances would be there. Often enough they’d even extend an invitation to me to come along. I always refused, mostly because wandering aimlessly around town in a massive group of people who look like they haven’t showered for over a week, yelling at the top of my lungs about some stuff or another, and then eventually pass out as the drink and drugs blots out the consciousness, isn’t my idea of good Friday afternoon. And I’m perfectly capable of doing all of that by myself, with the added benefit of taking a shower every single day.  

Part III. The Long Arm of the Law. Cult Status. Cowards Leave Through the Back Door Please.

This is really starting to bother the politicians now. They can’t sit around for much longer, letting these “eco-freaks”, as the new name goes, run around wantonly blocking major motorways, before the public get the idea in their heads that the government have been intimidated. By God! We can’t let them picture us that way… We’ve got to do something right now!

And they did. After five protests on the timeline, they didn’t want to let Insulate Britain get the idea that they can just get away with it every single time, so the ministers turned to the High Court for aid.  September 23rd was the day, a sunny day for most people except for Insulate Britain, because that was the day the High Court granted an injunction against them prohibiting any more wilful obstructions on the M25.

The heavier sections of that document stated that if anyone of these lunatics set foot on the M25 with the intentions of blocking it, they’d be held in contempt of court, not an easy thing to get through especially when the punishment for it will be an unlimited fine or 2 years of prison. Yes, prison, not jail. A real sentence, not a slap on the wrist for getting picked up during a protest.

The implications of this for the nature of protesting are dire. This sends a message the government didn’t want to send because it would make them look like fascist savages, as if they weren’t already that in the eyes of many. But their hand was forced this time, they had to play it and it pleased no one on the table. When the government can just clamp down on any protest and outlaw it in any area, showcasing their power, that’s a display that no one wants to see, particularly those who have a bone or two to pick with them. No one will feel pleased about living in a state where the freedom of expression is limited and knowing that the government can seal their mouths in any particular area of London they please will send a disconcerting chill down the spine of anyone who has an imagination which leans a bit too close to the dystopian.

But of course, there’s business and transport to think of. The M25 is the main gateway into London and many business owners have been whipped up in a cackling frenzy of fear and trepidation over the delays and disruptions in business these protests will cause. Every delivery truck that’s delayed en route, every deadline that’s missed, each haul that doesn’t make it to its destination with the product rotting in the trailer is money lost by the hour, a prospect that will turn businessmen stupid with rage like orangutans on insane doses of speed.

Activists everywhere in London just lost one bit of their protesting privileges. Anyone else who might’ve been planning some sort of demonstration on the M25 can now forget about it and move their gig someplace else.

In regard to Insulate Britain, that’s the flaw in the High Court’s injunction as it only keeps them off the tarmac of the M25, leaving them free to protest anywhere else, and considering that these whack-jobs have a taste for prancing around in the middle of the road, there are thousands of other ones for them to choose from. This injunction was perched precariously on the knifes edge of freedom to protest, which is why the government could bar them only off the M25, any further and the mask would fall off the putrid face of the Conservative government and reveal them for the unhuman freaks they are, galloping around the Parliament and stamping out the rights for people to protest like an anthill.

So far, the total number of arrests are 270. But they’ve been all set loose after their brief time soaking up the stifling air of the jailhouse. From now however, if they get nabbed by the cops, they’ll be in there for a lot longer than a night.

But that all seems part of the plan for these guys. Co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and the supposed mastermind behind Insulate Britain, Roger Hallam has big plans for his followers. His elaborate plan will shine light upon his movement and humiliate Boris Johnson in one fell swoop. His bright idea is to make a fool out of Boris Johnson at the Cop26 – the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference – in November by getting his own protestors locked up…. Wait a minute did I read that correctly? Christ on a bike I did! I want to see the face behind which the brain sits that came up with this fucking delusional idea. This withered, ageing man who looks like a cross between a hairless cat managing to grow some facial hair and a bald chimp is operating on a very special strain of insanity.

“The whole world will be looking at Johnson and they’ll say, ‘You’re Mr. Green and you’ve got 200 people in prison because they want you to insulate some houses?’ It’s not going to look good.” He says with the conviction of a schizophrenic describing their hallucinations.

Let me roll this around in my head so I can get an idea of what he’s talking about. So, this specimen of carnal denseness wants at least200 of his protestors to serve prison time during November till God knows when so he can maybe get the attention of the parties at Cop26 and aim their admonishments at Boris Johnson for locking these animals up? And the sheer fact that his protestors are completely on board his strategy of mass imprisonment, and that the number of recruitments for Insulate Britain are steadily climbing, or else how would they have more pawns to replace the ones arrested, just exhibits the sanity quotient of the people involved.

Unless…. Our friend Roger Hallam here fancies himself a Charlie Manson when he looks at himself in the mirror. How else do you think he overturns the sane and suggestive young minds of recent graduates and gullible anarchists on the many talks he’s held through the summer?

This man did after all study a PhD specialising in research around the capacity of civil disobedience and radical action to bring about social change, whether he finished it or not is a separate question altogether. Although if he did complete it, I wouldn’t accord him the same courtesy of calling someone ‘Doctor’ as I would to anyone else holding a PhD. My own beliefs in intelligence and common sense won’t allow me that.

He’s obviously gotten into their heads enough to convince them to throw themselves into the path of a 14-wheeler truck travelling at speeds enough to turn a human body into a bloody pancake. Who knows how far these dull-witted fanatics will go for him? I won’t be surprised at all if I found Mr. Hallam wandering around town with his own detail of praetorian guards. A man of his stature needs security, or the hands required to pick anyone he dislikes off the street and torture them by zapping their nuts using jumper cables.

Slow down man… these slanderous images of brutality are stepping a tad over the line here. I’m asking for a law suit here. But you’ve got to hear the way he talks in order to get your own distinct impression of him, one of a man totally whacked out on the high that comes from being a pea under the mattress of the system. A mere annoyance.

“Going to banks and smashing windows (as XR have done in the past) isn’t going to change anything. It’s not material resistance. It’s symbolic and won’t change anything.”

He continues, “We have the absolute responsibility to go further. 500 people in prison will bring about legislative change.”

If it was up to this horse-fucker, his entire movement except him would be looking out the small, brick-sized windows of prison while he jumps outside holding a sign saying, “Look what you’ve done!”

If anyone were in need of further proof on just how stark raving mad this “person” and his movement have become, look no further than Extinction Rebellion furthering themselves from this tainted group. Oh such magnificent irony!

Some Extinction Rebellion reps have quietly gotten in touch with Surrey Police and have complained how they’re being linked to Insulate Britain. They probably realised that their own co-founder who took a hiatus in the mountains of Wales all those months ago, leaving with a bag full of magic mushrooms and thick literature on civil disobedience, and returning as a disconsolately calm plank of wood, has turned into a liability and they must amputate this limb before the infection spreads further.

The decision was reached swiftly and it was time to call the police.

“Hello Surrey Police department.”

“Hello…” a voice whispers on the other end of the phone.

“Is this an emergency?” the female police despatcher asks confidently.

“My name is WXYZ and I’m part of Extinction Rebellion. I’m concerned for my life.” The whispering voice continues.

“Are you alright? Where are you calling from? Are you in any immediate danger?” the police despatcher kicks into overdrive.

“I’m calling from my home. I’m not in any danger at the moment but this is important.”

The urgent edge in the police despatchers voice softens a bit. “What is the matter then?”

“I’m calling about the activities of Insulate Britain. We don’t agree with them.” The whisper turns into a stern deceleration, still a whisper though.

“Neither do we. They’ve kept our hands full when we were supposed to have a quiet few days.” The despatcher responds in a regretful tone. “Is that all you called to tell me?”

“No, you don’t understand, we really don’t condone their actions.” Still whispering. “Don’t think for a second that we have anything to do with them…. Anymore.” The voice whispers further asking whether she understands what is being inferred.

“Ohhhhhhh. No more? Why?” the curiosity in the despatchers voice gives it away for a moment.

“They’ve all gone fucking insane! They have plans. They won’t mention anything but they’re cooking something and it doesn’t smell nice at all.” The whispering intensifies almost into an audible voice.

Just to cover her bases as the police academy has ingrained in her, the despatcher had to ask, “Cooking? Have you witnessed any drug production where ever they are based?”

“No! I mean they’re getting mixed up into something we don’t agree with. They’re going too far!”

“I see. What would you like me to do about it?” asks the despatcher sensing that this phone call is directionless.

“Look, just know that we have nothing to do with them anymore. They’re not some offshoot or sister movement to us anymore. Please.” That last entreaty wandered over into an audible sound coming from her throat rather than lungs.

Some shuffling on the phone and then a faint voice from the background. “What are you doing? Who are you on the phone to?”

No more whispers anymore, the voice of the caller talks normally to the one in the background, “Oh nothing Roger, just on the phone to my mother.”

The police despatcher a bit confused, touches her skin to make sure of something.

“Goodbye mother!” the voice booms through the receiver and hangs up.

The policewoman puts down the phone, turns left to her colleague and tell him about the strangest phone call she’s just had…

September 23rd 2021 still. Alongside the injunction against Insulate Britain came another landmark event which will lurk through their history like a vagrant holding a brick standing outside the bank with the intention of hurling it through the window. You can never trust such disreputables because you never know how much they have in them.

I envy those who witnessed this unfold live on TV because that must’ve been something to behold. I on the other had to help myself to scraps leftover in the form of clips and highlights on the internet. What am I referring to? The interview on Good Morning Britain of course. The best way to describe that show is that the police nor the government need not lift a finger against this group to destroy them because they’re doing a such a bang-up job of doing it themselves. What went down though?

A spokesperson for Insulate Britain, Liam Norton, was invited on for a little chit-chat on the talk show. The term “interview” doesn’t fit this exchange as well as “interrogation” does. Had this interview been aired on a sports channel, it would’ve easily been mistaken for a tennis match where one side completely drives over the other. Hosts Susannah Reid and Richard Madeley were the ones to carry out this verbal execution and they caught him out very early in the interview when they pointed out that Norton’s house wasn’t insulated. Stats gathered from Energy Efficiency, Liam Norton’s single-glazed, gas central heating house with no wall cavity insulation doesn’t exactly practice what he vehemently preaches. With the expression that seized up on Norton’s face for an imperceptible second, he really hoped that they wouldn’t find out and ask him about it. That ephemeral moment of total despair when you don’t know how you’re going to answer that.

His reply was surprisingly reasonable, saying that it costs “tens of thousands” to carry out something which millions [of people] can’t afford. Susannah Reid’s retort to that was something that he would not recover from however, because little did Norton know that he just used his last ounce of thought on his previous reply.

“Is that the case? You’re saying you would risk your life for Insulate Britain but you’re not going to insulate your own home? Sorry if that sounds patronising but it seems to completely sabotage your cause.”

Which it does when you take into account the lengths they’ve been going to make the lives of the authorities an abject nightmare of superfluous work. I don’t care what becomes of the cops or the government and what work they have to put in to clear the motorways, what I’m concerned about is the knock-on effect it’s having on the innocent people who have to hang around in their cars for hours at a time in a frozen traffic jam while these hollow-heads prance around demanding that the government insulate everybody’s homes. It completely discredits their motion and punches it full of holes like a human body in the line of fire of a 50-calibre machine gun when it comes out all of a sudden that one of the organisers of this movement doesn’t have an insulated home. No one will care whether he can afford it or not, all they’ll care about is the principle. No matter how much we deny it, we are subconsciously a species of principle and tradition. We prefer the good old ways when people stick to their word. Or do we? I can’t tell at this point with how muddled things have become…

Susannah Reid repeats the question whether he’s willing to lose his life orchestrating these awareness raising stunts, making Norton do what all other Insulate Britain organisers resort to in such a position, dodging the question completely or answering a separate imaginary question. He replies with the usual vague urgency that “people are going to lose their lives if nothing is done.”

When asked next if he was willing to risk the life of one of his protestors, in a moment of pure cosmic delirium as if calling out to the universe, he says, “It’s terrible isn’t it.” A lot of things are very terrible my friend, you’re going to have to be a little bit more specific than that.

This signalled his decline into madness, on live TV. A TV audience doesn’t get to see that every day. I would’ve loved to be inside of his head to witness his neurons firing rapidly like lightbulbs having a violent seizure and beholding his synapses being invaded by the purple mist of insanity as his mind recoils in horror. At this point the interview descends into disarray.

Out of nowhere with seemingly no connection at the moment, the man asks, “Do you know how many MPs supported Churchill in 1939?”

A confused Richard Madeley replies with, “I don’t care.”

“Six MPs and Churchill was right wasn’t he but only six supported him.” ventured Norton.

“You’re comparing yourself to Churchill? This must be the most twisted parallel I think I’ve ever heard.” Madeley confesses.

I mean who can blame Liam Norton? At that point I think his brain and the uncontrollable spasms of desperation it was falling into resembled a bucking horse after a gun goes off mere millimetres from its ear. Liam proceeded to dig his grave even deeper as he continued, “I’m putting myself in the historical situation where the public aren’t always with you but you’re still right. And we’re right now. We’re talking about the destruction of our economy and our health service.”

Right after saying that, he lapsed into a total dominating cluelessness, got up out of his chair as a void filled his head and stormed off the stage, babbling to himself, as if on auto-pilot, something about “the state of things.” The last glimpse the camera caught of Liam Norton was as he turned the stage and head towards the backdoor leading him presumably off the set, a blur as he speeds off the gallows engulfed in a haze of disgrace and shame, leaving an indelible stain of immaturity upon the name of Insulate Britain. Richard Madeley even commented during his walk-out as they basically shooed him off stage with laughter, that he bore a significant similarity to Piers Morgan. And no one has taken that rat bastard Piers Morgan seriously ever since, but then again when did people ever?

In regards to the whole Churchill thing, it really would’ve helped illustrate his point better if he led into it rather than coming right out with such a bizarre and far-fetched connection saying that he’s basically Winston Churchill in this situation. Some may say that his words were ever so slightly twisted by Richard Madeley, he could’ve taken in the point Norton was trying to make and see that as ridiculous and hyperbolic the connection may seem, there is indeed a faint thread connecting the two together. A stopped clock tells the time twice a day. But who the hell wouldn’t ridicule him like that? Especially since he’s been antagonising the hosts on their own turf through the whole interview.

The debate was not a calm one. He was a decibel or two away from screaming at the top of his lungs, and he maintained this volume throughout the whole talk. There’s being passionate about something, and then there’s showing yourself as a total wreck. Just because someone is screaming louder than the other person doesn’t necessarily make their argument better. Tell me who wouldn’t twist and ridicule the words of someone who act with such unceremonious disrespect on their show?

It scares me to think how the conversation must’ve gone when Liam Norton had to show his greasy little bald head to his superiors.

I can sense my sanity slipping away over how long I’ve spent latched to this sickly-sweet story. Words like “Insulate Britain” and “Injunctions” have very weird and hazy interpretations in my brain, divorced from what they usually mean. I should make myself a cup of tea and pull myself together to get this wreck in motion again. Grease up the wheels so to speak, or else we’ll be staring down the barrels of a linguistic breakdown.

Dropping randomly back into the territory of that High Court Injunction against Insulate Britain, Home Secretary Priti Patel was the face who delivered the injunction to the press and public. She is the face of this injunction now. So, when members of Insulate Britain caught wind of this, they retaliated back in the only way they knew how. Gathering right outside the Home Office with copies of the injunction in hand, they immediately set fire to those copies and yelled…

Part IV. “Fuck the Injunction”

It was about this time when I felt like the momentum of the story was beginning to burn out. It started out with that violent sort of acceleration which later leaves the engines completely zapped and unable to produce anymore movement. I had almost given up and accepted this as one of those cruel twists of anticlimactic fate like watching a firecracker go off and instead of beholding a swarm of fantastic fiery explosions, you are greeted with a pathetic pop and a small sliver of smoke emerging and disappearing inches above the dud. You realise how badly you’ve been cheated but you don’t really care because the way you were cheated was so outrageously bad that the disappointment from it is oddly hilarious. Or at the least as weighty as the enjoyment would’ve been. You just don’t know how to react in situations like that.

But the events which took place in the following few days restored my shaky faith in this saga, that it still has some life left in it. No need to unplug the life-support machine just yet.

Insulate Britain quickly realised the glaring hole in the injunction where the only place they’ve been banned from protesting is the M25. It’s not at all as if that’s the only motorway or major road in the area. So, they just casually picked up their act and headed for the Port of Dover for their next protest.

September 24th, just a day after the injunction, they appeared like a cist on the A20 access road which leads to the Port of Dover. 40 of them, they did their usual charade of blocking the road, spilling paint and gluing themselves to the road but also on top of petrol tankers this time. Variety is the spice of life after all. They sure do take some sick pleasure out of gluing themselves to stuff.

Imagine the king-hell pandemonium that would’ve broken out had one of those petrol tankers blown up with the protestors still stuck to them. All it would’ve taken was one small leak and a careless hand about to discard a smoking cigarette butt. KABOOM! 40 protestors would turn into 40 million pieces of human viscera scattered over a 40-mile area. A scene too bloody to imagine on print so I’ll just skip right past it.

At the end, 39 protestors were arrested, but will be eventually released because they’re not in contempt of court because of the simple fact that they’re not on the M25.

It’s not difficult to see why the Port of Dover was targeted this time. What with 17% of all British trade worth £122 billion flowing in and out of that port a year, between 400 and 500 trucks tooling in and out of the place every few hours, this is a heaving nexus of trade, which also means a hive of carbon going into smoke which greatly messes with the cool of Insulate Britain.

One person was particularly unhappy with these events and that was Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, who sought another injunction from the High Court, keeping these nit-wits off the Port of Dover. Later that day, the injunction was granted and yet another area become a no-go zone for Insulate Britain.

So began the game of cat-and-mouse between the British government and Insulate Britain. The ministers and politicians want to take tougher action against these hoodrats but they just don’t know what it is they can do. They can’t ban them from protesting or else they’ll have an even bigger and mightier mob on their hands swarming the streets of the capital and demanding the head of the Prime Minister and his cronies until they get their freedom to protest back. Strange and bitter images of the French revolution come to mind, and I must swallow them with a sip of my tea.

Until the court can come up with some creative way of stamping out the practices of Insulate Britain while not angering the bear of public opinion, all they can really do at the moment is grant injunctions keeping them off one area until the protestors move elsewhere and then the courts have to grant another injunction a few hours after, going on till Insulate Britain effectively kick themselves out of London. Then they’ll be the problem of some other city’s jurisdiction, but I have a feeling this possibility won’t come to pass. That pile of injunctions forbidding Insulate Britain to set foot in various parts of London will become so tall that its instability threatens to topple on top of anyone who so much as walks in its radius.

September 27th now. These people are laughing right into the faces of the law as they return for yet another protest on the M25. It seems they were completely serious about their gesture of burning up the copies of that injunction, because it seems that it doesn’t really terrify them at all. These people are either in possession of an iron will, or are completely insane. Or both.

They descended onto junction 14 of the M25 at 8am like a swarm of crazed hornets who’ve flown through a vaporous cloud of DMT smoke and participated in their usual modus operandi of gluing, spilling, blocking and shouting inane bullshit. This time there was something sinister in their expression which belied a blind faith in some malevolent force beyond their puny comprehensions. They knew they wouldn’t be messed with because their crazed maker has them under the encompassing shadow of his wing. Their determination was unhuman and unsettling. No longer are these the amateur activists who just finished university and decided to ditch all plans for the future and take part in something “bigger” and ended up in trouble instead. No, they’re messing with some voodoo shit now.

Before we end up taking this cosmic horror any further and my imagination perambulates out of control, let’s move right onto the important stuff. 53 people were arrested. They will be serving time now or will have to cough up an “unlimited fine”, whatever that means.

Even our old friend Liam Norton made an appearance at this protest, his first since that contemptible walk-out from Good Morning Britain, and spilled out some useless drivel while under caution, “You can throw as many injunctions at us as you like, but we are not going anywhere. You can raid our savings and confiscate our possessions” says he almost sounding like William Wallace’s “They’ll never take our freedom!” speech. Unfortunately for us, he continues, “You can deny us our liberty and put us behind bars. But that is only shooting the messenger. The truth is that this country is going to hell unless you take emergency action and stop putting Carbon into the air.” Liam Norton probably has a lot of proving himself to do since the fool he made of himself last time, which can probably account for his presence and threatening candour here.

This protest on the 27th couldn’t have come at a worse time for the motorists because these clowns pitched up their tent in the midst of a truly uncontrollable crisis. And we can form a pretty good idea from this country’s track record of how crises are handled…

Word out on the street is that we’re completely out of fuel. Petrol stations are encumbered by depressingly long queues of cars which stretch out for hours. This entire story has been plagued by the symptom of traffic jam. Every which way I look, there’s a car waiting to get somewhere but can’t. Some fuel stations have imposed a £30 limit on the fuel motorists can buy just to conserve some for others, while many more have just outright turned drivers away because they haven’t a single drop left in their reserves. How the fuck did we get to this? Where did we go wrong? The easy answer for that is when we started existing, but what I’m in search of is the complicated answer.

Anyone who’s found themselves zapping down the M25 or any another major road in London, may have noticed something peculiar. The cars are still there, people are still driving around like maniacs bent upon vehicular manslaughter, the trees are still waving in the wind as the motorists pass by, but something is missing. Not a lot of HGVs around. Yes sir, that’s a Heavy Goods Vehicle for you, and in today’s economy they are very important. These beasts of burden have almost virtually vanished from the roads. Is there a consecutive string of public holidays for HGV drivers that I wasn’t aware of? Those people who sit behind the giant steering wheels of these goliaths sure wish that was the case, because they’ve been burned over and over again. Exploited by their fat-cat multinational bosses from every which way, their wages have dropped, their working conditions have deteriorated and with the hauling industry totally crippled – financially speaking – their sub-human bosses doubled down on this ruthless exploitation. That, and the immigration laws tightening like a noose around their neck because of Brexit, the straw that broke the camel’s back for these drivers. This shit wasn’t even close to worth it anymore, so they hung up their keys and never looked back. A workers vacuum of about 100,000 drivers was left behind in the wake of this shortfall. When enough people to rival the population of a small city decide to quit an industry at around the same time, it goes to show the ragdoll ways in which these poor drivers were jostled around. No one in their right mind would want to put themselves through driving this gigantic truck, which is a bitch to handle and swerves like a ketamine addict sinking into a K-hole, any longer under the circumstances.

Yes, that’s all well and good but what does it have to do with fuel? It doesn’t take a genius to work it out that if there’s no heavy goods drivers available to deliver, those goods are going nowhere. And the fuel industry was hit the hardest by this lack of deliveries.

The way this was initially communicated to the public was in such a poorly worded and misrepresented manner that the people got the completely wrong idea of what the situation actually was. According to what the people were told, there was a shortage of fuel. Imagine being told that a resource like fuel is in its final few measures now, especially a fossil fuel like that which will eventually run out. The stuff is running out?! I’ll be goddamned if I don’t get my hands on some of it before they’re dry! This stuff has value. Black gold. You won’t spare a moment before you’re out there with every car you own, empty kerosene tanks piled up in the backseat, driving towards the nearest petrol station to fill up and prepare for the fuel holocaust. What you didn’t anticipate however was that everyone else had the exact same idea. That’s just the way we’re all wired. It’s a one-two punch of panic and greed. Same thing happened with toilet paper and other essential groceries during the early days of the COVID hell. There’s a little part inside us which is alwaysprepared for the end. When the nature of the universe is such that it inexorably hurtles towards the end, everything within it, whether they’re aware of it or not, are preparing for that along the way. If we’re going to die, we might as well make our last few days here as comfortable as possible. And it’s none of your business if I don’t own a car and still want to buy some fuel to sniff it. I’m a paying customer you fuck-wit! Don’t mess with free enterprise man.

Anyway, people did as people do and panic bought as much fuel as they could cough up the money for, which was good news at first for the petrol stations because they thought they’d still be receiving some deliveries anytime now, and business was booming! But pretty quickly the grim nature of their predicament set in like a debilitating illness when no truck-hauled-tankers arrived, and the queues of fuel-parched cars kept lengthening. Some of the shrewder ones tried to enforce a £30 limit for each car, but that went down as well as one can expect when paying customers are told that they can’t buy as much as they came here for. However even that didn’t help because pretty soon under all this demand the petrol stations ran dry and the last drop of fuel dripped out of the pumps. People pounced on that last drop as it fell to the ground and began licking the floor, trying to get every relishing bit of it out of the concrete, like thirst-crazed people out in the middle of the desert when their minds turn upside down enough that they begin seeing mirages. The picture looks pretty grim here in London. 90% of fuel outlets have run bone dry with the demand rising to a staggering 500% from the previous week of writing this and still no delivery trucks in sight. The queues are still there as people desperately cling onto the hope that a truck will come tooling in any moment now and they’ll be bathing in diesel once the pumps start up again. Petrol station staff have turned hysterical at having to constantly turn people away, meeting reactions from motorists that cover all the shades of aggression.

Facebook and Twitter are exploding with pleading cries from people asking the public if they know of any pumps anywhere they can get some fuel from, following the hope that someone altruistic enough might just give them a tip off and not take it for themselves. Others have taken to more demented extremes, stalking the few HGV drivers on the road who are headed to petrol stations fortunate enough to be ahead in the order for deliveries, following them right to their destination and filling up.

There’s something about such a torturous magnitude of desperation which really kills all capacity for thought. Many of these fuel stalkers, as I’ll be calling them from now until their affliction is at an end, drive around for hours looking for a tanker and then they glue themselves to their trail which goes on for some more time on top of that, burning up more fuel in the process that they’d ever hope to refill out of such a doomed endeavour. Signs of insanity are beginning to manifest in the public, and if this is how the human race composes itself in times of crisis then we have waived all right to call ourselves an ‘intelligent species’.

Until this whole mess is sorted, I’ll be taking a shot of any spirit that I can immediately get my hands on every time I see an HGV on the road, because these things have attained the status of myth now.

Meanwhile government officials have handled this crisis a way which looks like a zoological experiment involving pigs and controlled brain damage. The Tories have been wandering around in abject confusion, acting as if those 100,000 lorry drivers disappeared overnight. I wouldn’t be surprised if upon asking some government officials stuck with the story that these drivers have been abducted by aliens… This is the level of hypothesised ineptitude we’re dealing with. And I will seek to turn that hypothesis into a proper statement in the following few sentences.

Senior Tory MPs, among them Andrea Leadsom, who also was the former Business Secretary, has been urging people to not blame the government for this. She’s also telling people, in the vein of a street preacher who is babbling pure ridiculous shit, that there’s “plenty of fuel.” I suppose it’s because of this abundance of fuel that doctors and schoolteachers can’t get to work – having to resort to online consultations and classes for their patients and students respectively. In that case people should probably shut their mouths when they say that according to the figures this is the worst fuel crisis to hit Britain in 20 years. What on Earth are they talking about when there’s clearly “plenty of fuel”?!

Noticing things on the ground swivelling way out of control like the engines of a Ferris wheel spinning the thing so fast that the carriages are ripped out of the frame by sheer force, members and civil servants of his party implored, nay demanded, Boris Johnson appear on TV and tell the people to stop panic buying. In their words they want him to “get a grip on this crisis” because that’s exactly what our brave and fearless leader is lacking right now.

But we have no reason to fear any longer because Boris has a grand plan to replenish the fuel supplies in the forecourts. His highly effective strategy will bring enough drivers to tackle the shortage and we will be a strong and independent country again. His plan? Oh yes. “Listen up everyone because I’ll only say it this one. I’ll grant a free… yes that’s right free three-month working visa to 5000 foreign heavy load drivers who would want this job. I mean why wouldn’t they want this job? To work for us and help us out of this tricky situation which the universe has put in our path to test our strength and will… Immigration laws? What immigration laws, I’m the PM so I can turn back on those laws if I want. The European ministers? Oh, they’ll happily lend us some drivers. We’re this tight. Just you watch, we’ll be out of this mess by the end of the week…”

How I pity the Prime Minster’s naivety. There are so many holes in this knee-jerk impulsive plan that it makes a spaghetti strainer shy from inadequacy. First of all, I think the Tories are starting to early signs of Dyscalculia, because these numbers just don’t add up. How are 5000 new drivers supposed to handle the high-tension backload of deliveries that 100,000 were supposed to originally carry? I suppose they’re under the illusion that these new drivers will be worked to the bone for our benefit and then they’ll be discarded like yesterday’s socks.

And then there’s the problem of timing. This three-month working visa only covers them up until Christmas. What’s the direction after that? Such a short term “solution” would suggest that no long-term plans have been drafted up yet. But I can imagine Boris Johnson’s beat up face appearing on TV with the long-term plan to fix this fuel crisis. He’ll address the nation and urge everyone to start fucking… yes sex, reproduction, make babies, and put set them on a lifelong path of learning the delivery and haulage trade. By the time they’re of age, we’ll have enough drivers to get fuel to the stations.

At any rate why the fuck would European truck drivers who have secure full-time jobs in their home countries, quit those and then come here for a temporary three-month gig where they’ll be overworked, underpaid, underappreciated and then when the times up, given the same expendable treatment that the NHS staff were given after the initial thrust of COVID was over. Put your hands together for an applause and then forget about them. European ministers have even said themselves that their lorry drivers refuse to “help the UK out of the shit they created themselves.”

“We created this?” you can hear the Tories howling. “It wasn’t our fault! As we said time and time again, these drivers were abducted by an unidentified species of alien, they pretty much disappeared overnight I tell you…”

What this waste of breath of a plan highlights most of all in the British character is this fair-weatheredness, changing the ways they forced people to adopt in the first place just to relieve their problems when it suits them. This gross double-standard is why we’re mocked and vilified as a country who can’t and won’t ever stand on their own two feet again. The Tories wanted independence and freedom, no longer to be considered a part of the European open market because they thought it would make them appear weak and unable to sustain themselves. Opportunities and freedoms for the next generation were denied by an almost equal vote in the referendum to leave the EU, in favour of the old guard – people who are dead by now and didn’t even live to see the effects of what they were voting for. The government wanted this and they forced it down our throats. We want our own market; we don’t want to be a part of this union anymore; we can make it all by ourselves out there. The temper tantrum Britain threw on the world stage was so disgraceful and painful to watch that countries just turned their heads initially but then eventually decided to yield to our beggings.

We got what we wanted now. We’re the UK. We can do it ourselves now just like we did in the days of the empire! But now that we find ourselves in the styx, those same hypocritical bastard politicians who voted in favour of leaving the EU because they didn’t want immigrants in our pure and blessed land, are the ones who are in favour of the motion to let immigrants in just to help us. At least they’re sticking to their true character and kicking them out immediately afterwards once the job is done. No point in letting them nurse any false hopes that they’d get to stay here.

We’re ran by a ward of pathological fascist hypocrites who need to be locked up and lobotomised for their own good.

Goddamn did I really go there? Lobotomy? Treason? Another unbridled tangent that served no purpose to the main skeleton of the story. Maybe I’m the one in true need to psychological treatment. If I get to have any say in the matter, I’ll take shock treatment.

Wheeling back around to Insulate Britain, or at least trying to wheel with the very limited amount of fuel going round, their protests have been the interventions of something portentous and horrid. With enough panic and dismembering confusion in the air already, these protestors couldn’t have picked a worse time to show their ugly faces and throw a wrench into people’s plan. Holding up yet more traffic, shooting more carbon into the air and not to mention all the fuel that’s burning into useless energy as they stand idle in this carnival of a traffic jam.

It was on September 29th that I got up, made myself a cup of tea and started my day with some deafening loud music. Dropping my girlfriend off to the train station so she could get to work, I picked up a copy of the Metro, the Evening Standard and the Times as is my ritual. Returning home to have a casual perusal of the nonsense going in outside the relative insanity of my four walls, I was greeted by the same horrid news in all three newspapers that day. I read the small article and I felt my brain stem sink into my spinal column and felt such an overwhelming surge of disappointment and grief that I turned my music off to get a hold of myself before I smashed a glass on the wall and swallowed it. A violent migraine seized my head the moment those ugly sentences embedded themselves into my head. The 53 people arrested on the protest which took place on the 27th had just been released from custody. No prison sentence, no fine to mention of, no ramifications for their actions despite their act of contempt against court. Just a slap on the wrist and they were sent along their way.

The day the M25 injunction was granted, the ministers were speaking like America during the Cold War, high and mighty and vowing to retaliate with the full extent of the law against those who go against it. They wouldn’t settle for anyone pissing on their turf and they made a point of it by constantly saying how any dissenters would be punished if they protested on the M25 again. But when the time came to actually act, the authorities turned into a bunch of jelly-legged cowards. They had all the power at their disposal to teach these punks a lesson, but instead they just chose to do nothing. Up until this point the scales were tipping towards the authorities because they have the means to lay down the law and enforce it, even though the whole chase between the establishment and Insulate Britain began to look like a tiring game of cat and mouse, they were still the ones ahead. But now the tables have turned completely and Insulate Britain are walking away with the confidence that they can do this again and get away with it. “What the fuck are they going to do? Arrest us?”

The courts have successfully made a mockery of themselves and undermined their own power by dismantling their intimidation tactic, it’s a simple as that. And this is difficult to recover from because when the ones in charge show the first signs of weakness, all trust and fear in them begins to break down. But they’ve been undermining and discrediting themselves and each other for centuries now, which can account for the complete absence of any trust or respect between the people and the government. They got pissed on by Insulate Britain and asked for more…

Which they got the very next day on September 30th, the last day of this strange and dizzying month, when Insulate Britain appeared yet again with the determination of a tumour on the M25 and blocked off Junction 30 at 7:30am. At this point their actions and MO is becoming as predictable as the level of stupidity that comes out of the minds of anyone running this country, so I need not mention what they got up to that morning in the middle of the road. 11 people arrested the first time round, and then a second group of 16 protestors appeared later during the day at 1pm and blocked the same junction and were swiftly arrested bringing the total for that day to 27. But really, for how long will they be held? Will they just be released the very next day with a stern word? Unless they have secret plans to double down on the punishment they’ll deal out to the people who repeatedly show themselves at these protests, but I don’t think the authorities have that level of evil creativity nor the backbone in them.

The Crime Commissioner for Surrey Police, Lisa Townsend, stated that legal proceedings against the protestors are already underway. Doors are being knocked and some are being served with papers to appear in court. However, something about the lightness in these statements makes me think that nothing actionable is really going down. She went on say that they can’t charge the protestors for minor offences or else the charge will be discontinued. It seems what the police really need is for the protestors to slip up and commit some serious felony crime to meet the threshold of criminal prosecution. Something real dirty like aggravated assault or first-degree murder. What eludes me though is that they have these protestors completely against the wall with the injunction. They can cart them off to prison right now and throw them in the murkiest, most claustrophobic cell, if they start prosecuting them right now, which is something they’re not doing for some inexplicable reason…

It’s really a shame. I would absolutely love to applaud the persistent actions of Insulate Britain. They come back again and again with a steely resolve to stick a finger in the face of the establishment. Unafraid and undeterred by any threat or consequence the politicians say they’ll deal out, they keep coming back to make their lives a living hell. They are the perfect adversary for this wretched government. Only trouble is that their actions are also affecting the people they are standing up for. They’re making everyone’s life a living hell. And they seem so totally oblivious to the side-effects of their protests. They’ve carried on this road blocking act for so long that they can’t shake themselves out of it to pursue an alternative way of protesting. They’ll just keep turning up, like a piercing headache which is definitely brain cancer, and distribute the pain out to everyone. What they don’t realise is that they’re doing more damage to the innocent bystanders around them than they are to the system. And in spite of their fearlessness, it’s for this reason I won’t allow myself to support or applaud their actions.

Same shit, different day. With the first day of October comes yet another protest. Three actually taking place one after the other on different parts of the M25 and M4. Junction 3 of the M4 near Heathrow Airport – yet another one of those fatal attacks near the airport where frustrated drivers are shoved to the brink of insanity as the time ticks down until their flights take off without them -, Junction 1 of the M1 which is actually not too far from me, had I possessed the foresight of their plans I would’ve turned up there demented on a cocktail of drugs and wreaked havoc on their performances with sheer intimidating loonery. Then shortly after a third group boarded off Junction 25 of their favourite place to protest. By the end of the afternoon 39 people were arrested, many of them from the group who were arrested and released post-injunction.

A good number of these protestors had been arrested seven consecutive times. Even some of the organisers thought that their people would be breathing prison air by now, but were surprised to see them walk in and out of the jailhouse like a serial pisser with a weak bladder walks in and out of the toilet after a glass of water.

“The government could end this tomorrow one way or another either by making a meaningful statement we can trust … or by sending our members to prison.” said one of the organisers to the press.

This is all really starting to turn awfully repetitive and terminally boring. I don’t know how much longer I can follow the trail of this story because it’s fallen into the same movements as a paranoid schizophrenic’s brain as it falls into an acid induced thought loop.  The prospect of covering another protest each day I wake up, knowing the events and outcomes already before even opening the paper, is filling me with a profound sense of entrapment. Even the newspapers have grown tired of wasting ink on this wretched story, the page coverage of each subsequent protest piece shrinking gradually until it takes up no more than a small paragraph shoved in the corner of the page. I’ll wait for something major to happen but if that train doesn’t pull into the station soon, then I’m abandoning it to its derailment. This deadlock between the government and Insulate Britain seems like a wall too high for either one of them to leap over. Break this stalemate now and just start shooting each other in the streets because this is getting mind-numbingly boring for me….

Tis now October 2nd, and the foul effects of this month have begun to manifest. Octobers have never been a good month for either me or my girlfriend. Only good thing about it that we suffer through this cosmic madness together and rejoice once November rolls over the horizon like the golden marmalade rays of sunshine after a hard night of despair.

In regard to the matter which spurred me to chronicle this preternatural saga of lunacy, nothing major has happened today, which in my mind is both a good and bad thing. I was in need of a small break from covering this shit-show, even if it’s just for a day. And with enough things going wrong for me today where I feel on the verge of a violent meltdown, I could afford not to lose my temper anymore over this.

What did happen today was a case of sweet irony! A taste of their own dirty medicine… On the day that Insulate Britain decide to take a day off – effectively giving me one too – one of their activists put herself up for grilling by an online mob when she complained on Twitter about missing her yoga class when she got stopped and searched by a police officer. What started out as a moment of venting for her, in her empty head, soon turned into a feeding frenzy. Poor Miss Phillipa Windsor who announces to the whole world in her Twitter bio that she’s an activist for Insulate Britain had to pluck up the energy to write this tweet…

“Dear @policeconduct

On my way to Bandha class this morning, I was followed, stopped & searched by intimidating police who claimed I was conspiring to obstruct a highway!

They found no #InsulateBritain banners in my car, were unduly rude & I missed the whole class as a result.”

These words put together in this manner, typed out by the arthritic fingers of this middle-aged bat reek of impetuous stupidity and a lack of self-awareness on a magnitude so baffling that its radioactive. Here are some of responses to this tweet.

“What about the way you cause mayhem for others? Lost hospital appointments, wages lost, funerals missed by reckless behaviour?”

“Some will call this irony, others will call this karma”

“No sympathy for you at all”

I suppose the devil didn’t expect to hear that when he rode a tank and held a general’s rank. But that devil had a bit more in the way of style and form than this ageing, irrelevant, white trash woman who thinks she can get away with doing the very thing she’s currently bitching and complaining about online.

None of these Insulate Britain activists have a right to be mad at the police. Me and the cops have never seen eye to eye, especially with the recent string of violent attacks against women and the cops wandering around with their feet in their mouths. There was never any respect for them in the first place so I had nothing to lose for them. But on this particular occasion, they’re an instrument who are playing their tune above the din these idiots are creating. The enemy of my enemy being my friend sort of scenario.

And these people have paraded themselves around the M25 so often that they might be mistaken for road signs. Of course, this one was going to get stopped and searched because she got clocked by the pigs. Apart from their plaster-walled faces and general lack of hygiene which makes them look like they’ve been dragged around in pig manure, there’s a cloud of suspicion which hangs over the way these activists present themselves. They’re always looking so shifty.  Even in the way they drive, they do so with the furtive uncertainty of what they’re about to do, even if they have no intentions of doing anything. Identifying them is like shooting sleeping ducks in a barrel. Their entire demeanour gives themselves away and if the authorities don’t have enough dirt on them to send them to the tin-can, then at least they have that element of recognition over them.

For me on the other hand, the momentum of this story is starting to burn out. The state of this piece is beginning to resemble a rocket losing speed during its blast-off and curving back down towards Earth. Like the sullen eyes at mission control who know that it’s all doomed and have to start calling the clean-up crew, all I can do is watch and follow where this giant explosive tube will land. It’ll be no problem finding it because a horrifying explosion will mark its ugly grave from miles away. No need to prolong this misery any longer so all I can hope is that it quickly meets the ground and blows up in a fiery cloud of rocket fuel and debris.

Part V. The Eternal Recurrence. Oh, Mamma Where is my Sweet Relief? The Ticket Out of here…

October 4th. It’s been a fair few days. I disembarked from this story and took a holiday from it, fled the city towards frantic oblivion and tried to put as many miles as possible in between me and this mess. But as every holiday goes, it comes with an expiration date. When my bus arrived at Victoria coach station, the first thing I did was run over to the newspaper racks. In spite of the towering dread of plunging myself back into this sinkhole, my twisted curiosity got the better of me. I just had to know exactly what sort of crude developments had accumulated during my two-day retreat. Flicking through the pages, hoping to catch an ugly glimpse of a high-vis vest, I rummaged through two newspapers and found nothing.

“What?” I thought, “Did these bastards decide to take a holiday same time as me?”

Newspapers rolled under my arm, my girlfriend and I got on the train heading back home. Once my girlfriend got a hold of the newspaper however, and started actually reading through it, did she find one small insignificant story regarding these road-lunatics.

“Your friends are in the paper again.” She said to me while pointing at a truly miniscule box right in the corner of the two-page story in The Metro with no relation to the issue whatsoever. This time they blocked four different pinch-points on the M25 near Hangar Lane, Blackwall Tunnel, Arnos Grove and Wandsworth Bridge. All the paper decided was worth mentioning were the locations and number of arrests (38) and the amount of time it took the police to clear up the roads (4 hours). Seems even the newspapers are as indifferent to this story as I.

Upon returning home, I decided it might be useful to dig a little deeper. See if I could get anything else out of this occurrence than what the papers were letting up. Ye fucking gods! The dimension of this story online was completely different than what ended up in the papers. Hot headed clashes between the motorists and protestors, people taking matters into their own hands and admissions of inhumane acts of dispassion by the group’s leader. This is the stuff I was searching for in the paper. Looks like I’ve got to drag my fingers across this keyboard and continue along the circuit once again. But not today. I’m tired and I have some cleaning up to do and most of all I have a gigantic fucking headache and lots of sleep to catch up on…

Sirens scream through the morning as an ambulance races towards Canterbury hospital. The speed and loud piercing sound of the blaring sirens create an odd synthetic effect together, making the bright sunlight buzz off the lime-green surface of the vehicle as it zips down the road before the clock runs out for the elderly patient in the back. Like a shadow, another car, a dark blue sedan being driven by a woman on the brink of a breakdown, is hot on the ambulance’s tail as it follows it to a similar destination.

The ambulance driver cuts the vehicle through the slip-road which takes him down towards Blackwall tunnel. The traffic starts to thicken like sauce in a bubbling pan, yet the driver remains indefatigable in his speed and precision. He has complete control over this vehicle and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t get that patient to the hospital on time. Consternation begins to creep into his mind like rising damp up a wall, he’s read aplenty about the maniacs who’ve been blocking the roads around London. “I hope they don’t turn up here…” A vain hope which he’ll come to learn later, but not now! He’s in the driver’s seat and that lady in the back will not be seeing death today! The current density of the traffic has forced the driver to shift down a gear and cut back on the acceleration. With every passing minute, his hopes begin to fizzle away until they meet a swift end when he finds himself at a total standstill, almost at the head of a long line of cars with their engines roaring with furious impatience. Just up ahead the driver can make out a gaggle of people in high-vis vests, carrying large red and blue signs and just sitting idly in the middle of the road. Cars were honking all around the ambulance but no one in the immediate vicinity would’ve been able to hear it above the deafening electric death-wail of the ambulance’s siren.

Right behind the paramedic vehicle, the car which was following it earlier is stuck in this static line of heating metal too. Already beside herself with abject worry, this was the very last thing the lady in the following vehicle needed to happen. Because of course she knew exactly what was going on here. Tears begin streaming down her face in large rivulets as the possibility that her mother will die right in the back of that ambulance begins to take shape. And all for what? Just because a bunch of selfish hateful bastards wanted to block off a road?! She can feel the hate rising like a nuclear reactor approaching meltdown. Possessed by pure indignation she opens the door and leaves the car. Her eyes are ablaze with fury, made even more turbulent with the inexorable stream of tears still spilling out of those sockets. Marching in between the lanes towards the blockage upfront, she meets those scoundrels head on.

Two protestors, who were made entirely out of folds in their crumpled clothes and wrinkled skin, sat on the road got up and approached the barriers as they noticed this lady storming towards them with all the calamity of a tornado.

“My mother is in the back of that ambulance there, we really need to get her to the hospital. Can you please just let us get past?” She asked in as polite of a tone as she could manage, there was no helping the straight edge in her voice which came from the fear.

What one of the protestors said, a particularly imbecilic looking fellow with bags under his eyes and hair which resembled a bird’s nest after a firecracker exploded right in the centre of it, sent the poor lady’s composure launching off the handle. “No.”

The anger began rising and reached a catastrophic boil, but knowing that the clock was swiftly winding down for her mother and that she was at the mercy of these self-absorbed tramps, all she could really do was beg. Earnest pleads began shrieking out of her throat at a volume which could’ve torn her larynx, “How can you be so selfish?! She is in the ambulance; she is going to the hospital in Canterbury. Do you think I’m stupid?”

The protestors just stood there like walls, staring at her with the same indifference that paint gives to people who watch it dry, while she continued, “This isn’t ok, this is NOT OK! I will support you but not now! How can you be so selfish? Can you not understand? My mum is 81 and she’s going to hospital!”

Bored motorists in the surrounding cars pulled their phones out and recorded this desperate exchange, videos which ended up all over the internet the following evening, setting in motion events which would lead to the pathetic downfall of this merry band of cretins.

The paramedics in the ambulance had had enough of sitting there and doing nothing. Compelled by the resolve to take matters into their own hands as none had done before in similar situations, they both got out of their cars and stampeded over to the protestors. Their blue gloved hands grabbed the protestors by the shoulders and dragged them right out of the poor lady’s sight who was two degrees too close to a seizure at that point. The other protestors took problem to the proceedings and began to actually protest, that is to the actions of the paramedics.

“Your actions will take the lives of many!” A middle-aged lady with long pig tails falling out of her orange wool beanie, which is a funny detail because she smelt like a pig too, declared.

“And we’ve got a lady in the back of that van who we need to get to hospital right now! She’s dying there, move out of the way and let us through!” Bellowed one of the paramedics while he hauled another protestor out of the way by his collar.

Positively intimidated by the wrath of the paramedics, the protestors looked at one another resignedly and shrugged the shoulders in a gesture of one-off defeat right before they began clearing a path out of the road block, wide enough to let the ambulance fit through. Marching back to their van, the paramedics promptly got back in and whisked the lime-green blur towards Canterbury hospital.

Later during that day, Roger Hallam appeared on a podcast called Unbreak the Planet, where he single-handedly pulled apart his whole movement and proved to the world that what they’re dealing with is a bunch of psychotic baboons who broke out of London Zoo.

The conversation steered towards the protestors letting the ambulance through the blockade, and Hallam’s thin rubbery mask of humanity dropped and exposed the scum-sucking zealot that he is underneath when he not only admonished the protestors for letting the ambulance through but said that had he been there on the scene he wouldn’t have let any ambulance through, even if it was at the expense of a dying patient’s life.

The most unsettling thing is the sheer detachment with which he spat out that phlegmatic statement and the cold conviction on his face, the sort that knows there will be no ramifications for saying something so unspeakable in front of a vast audience. What we have on our hands is a jaundiced eco-fascist with ideas far out of his own control and a rabble of wooden-headed followers who would sooner be flattened under the wheels of a Prius than disobey their supreme holy leader, or whatever the fuck they call Roger Hallam. It’s safe to call them a cult and historically the best way to deal with a cult is to nail them up on a wall and set them on fire for everyone to remark upon. I’m pretty sure that not even the Earth would mind the carbon emissions from their smouldering corpses, so long as it gets rid of them in the end.

It was on October 9th when the last nail in the coffin was hammered. Everything that happened after this was mute. Our esteemed friend Liam Norton appeared once again to twist the knife deeper into the stomach of Insulate Britain, this time on talkRADIO. It’s already a matter seared into the public record that his house isn’t what they’d exactly call ‘insulated’, despite the weird hullabaloo they’ve raised over it. Cristo Foufas, the radio presenter wanted Norton’s side of the story, because there must be a perfectly good reason as to why.

As the question worked its way into Norton’s mind, a look of curious mischief wiped over his face and he blurted out, “Because I’m a hypocrite.”

Immediately sensing that what he had on his hands there was a golden goose, unfortunately not the type that lays eggs but one which produces words of its own undoing, Cristo pushed the conversation further so the “eggs” would come popping out.

“Do you understand why people will think, well this guy doesn’t care about insulation, he only cares about causing disruptions and making a name for himself.”

And then in a baffling moment of treacherous surprise, Liam Norton swung the hammer and said, “Yeah they’re right. I don’t particularly care about insulation.”

The words left his mouth and set me free from the chains of this wretched story. I knew that this was the end of the road and I felt an ambivalent mix of relief and loss. But before I could let those feeling take root, I had to make sure that this corpse was truly dead. I don’t want it waking up and turning into an undead inconvenience. So, I waited.

Minor things happened here and there; a third injunction passed which warded 14 separate major locations around London from the snide trickster spirits of these protestors, a meeting was held among the protestors where a journalist managed to sneak in and bring information of the truly uneventful things they talked about, but these were nothing more than the involuntary spasms the cadaver twitches with as decomposition begins. Four long and anticipatory days have passed since the last road blocks. Now is as good time as any to lay this monster to rest, bury the coffin deep underground, beneath layers of cement. If the bastard comes back to life, it’ll be too late. Enjoy thrashing and screaming to yourself in that splintery casket of yours, no sound will get through the amount of cement I’ll be putting on top of you.

For months to come, the name Insulate Britain will bring nothing but repulsion and failure to the minds of… no one, because they will have been long forgotten by then. The half-life of information is very short these days, and the radiation twice as toxic. These fuckers were lacking in common sense as much as they were lacking a plan. They set out to whip the government into action, or at the very least get the people talking about the issue of climate change. But all they ended up achieving was the combined odium of a whole nation and more carbon emissions than they prevented. No one can blame them for lacking guts however, no matter stupid and dense they were. They squared up to the government and proved they weren’t afraid of any book being thrown at them, although they also proved that they didn’t give a moment’s thought to the effect it would have on other people. They’ll go down in history as simply an embarrassment to the act of protesting; a movement which turned the gun on itself based on how clumsily its leaders composed themselves when the eyes of the nation were upon them – doing a much better job of ruining themselves than their opposition could ever try. It makes one truly wonder if their true intentions this whole time was just to waste our time.

In an unmarked grave somewhere in Hampstead Heath, on a tough patch of ground near the lake, if you stand with the right kind of ears with the perfect conditions of silence, you might hear a faint mumbling issuing from the ground. Don’t try to make out the horribly stupid words which are muffled by the faintness, instead call me on this number (07778******) and I’ll be over as quick as I can with more cement.