Thursday 7th March

As a nation we seem to have lost our way.  Nobody knows where we are going, but this no Magical Mystery Tour I am afraid.  Almost every section of society is simply treading water.  Maybe we can make an exception for the traders, the currency speculators, the financial product boys whose bonuses are in the realms of lottery wins; at least these guys know where they are going, and conversely they don’t give a fuck where their activities are taking the country.

The poor have no time to worry where they are going, as they are shifted from bedsit to hotel room and shortly from town to town in a downward spiral of cost-cutting, with only a few fags and maybe a two-litre bottle of cider to relieve the tedium; theirs is a wholly pointless existence with no direction at all.

The young have no idea where they are going; is it to University where they may end up wasting three years, coming out with a degree which no-one is impressed enough by to give them a job and a loan that seems disproportionate to the years of effort, or do they rush out and just get a job stacking shelves in Tesco, or as a kitchen porter, or some other unskilled job where the minimum wage will also be your maximum ever wage.  Or do you simply vegetate in your bedroom, because you will never be able to afford your own house, and cannot see yourself moving out until you are thirty.   And so you waste whatever meager money you have on computer games and mobile phones that at least occupy your boring evenings because downstairs your mum and dad are couch potatoes who watch one soap after another or celebrity quiz shows,  because they don’t have the imagination to go out or even to switch the darned tv off occasionally.

The old are stuck indoors too, watching as their savings dwindle and the price of petrol goes higher and higher, and they read the Daily Mail and tutt about how immigrants from Bulgaria are waiting to invade our island home.

And our leaders do not know where we are going either; more years of the same austerity, or a not very convincing and unspecified financial plan from the opposition.  No leadership, no vision, no hope – welcome to Britain.