Apoca-watch - a semi regular series keeping tabs on civilisation's inevitable descent into screaming, raping chaos.

...and three weeks later everyone was fucking dead.

Who likes pigs? Everyone. Ahh, Babe - ain't he sweet. Bacon - ain't it tasty. But not so fast, Speedy Gonzalez - it turns out that the the pigs have got it in for us. The news that Birmingham has recorded its first case of swine flu has Pete barricaded inside the house, mainlining lemsip and wearing fourteen pairs of thermal pants. Word has it that swine flu is a hellish chimaera of human, bird and pig illnesses, hatched in the burning mexican heat and out to nick your car and feel up your nan. Terrifying stuff indeed. Now without wanting to cause unfounded panic or hysteria, I can confidently predict that swine flu will devastate the populace, lay waste to our cities and leave the earth a scorched and burning ruin.

Of course, we won't notice because we'll all be watching this.

Fun extra activity - place your bets on how long it'll be before I'm forced to remove the heavily copyrighted image from this week's fun episode of IHIH!

Day of Rest.

Sunday: an official deity-sanctioned day of rest. It's written into the Bible that nobody is doing shit on a Sunday. How generous is that? A whole day off. Lovely. Maybe I'll wash the car.

But let's not forget the small print because if you're following the rule to the letter you won't be picking up anything bigger than an olive - that is verboten. Anything bigger than that counts as work and The Lord will be really shitty with you for working on his specially allotted day off. So no going to the pub - that pint of Guinness is far too heavy for that - no watching TV - ditto the remote control - and no food, unless you're eating olives. One at a time. Fair enough, you can lie in bed all day but what's the point if you can't even make a fucking cuppa? It's fairly typical of religion to give with one hand whilst flicking your balls with the other but as conditions go that one is a right cocksuck.

I'm having a lovely Sunday, as it happens. I picked up a whole egg earlier. God will just have to bill me for it.

Britain's Got Patronising Cunts.

Britain, you do not disappoint. I've only been back a fortnight and this happens. First a video that I couldn't embed because the good people at Youtube wouldn't let me, the shits:

To be fair, she does look like she's been beaten by a tramp with a golf club.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luRmM1J1sfg

I mean, where do you start with this? The teenage girls in the audience, wrinkling their nose and making snide comments about the mad old bat in the charity shop dress? Pier's Morgan arse-clenchingly smug grin? That blonde wench, all quivering lip and hand-to-breast clasping? I haven't seen anything so sickening since, well.... the last time I was like, really sick.

Making fun of freaks and weirdoes has been good clean fun since the Victorians had it and there's nowt wrong with that. It's woven into the very fabric of British life - the only difference these days is that the freaks volunteer, which saves having to corral them into special pens and is generally a handy timesaver. So when a single, 47 year old, unemployed Scottish lady rocks up and claims that she can sing like Elaine Page (whoever the fuck she is), looking as she does, the brutal mathematics of televisual cruelty kicks in. She's going to make a fool of herself, and we're all going to enjoy it.

But of course, she's amazing, and we are all chastened by the way this plucky underdog has subverted our cynical expectations regarding the relationship between talent and ugly. It's so Disney I could kick myself in my own bollock. Don't stress now: I'm not here to deliver a sermon on the generally accepted belief that good looks equals ability because it's a perfectly natural human reaction and we all do it every day. Let's face it - no one with eyebrows that hefty has any right having a voice like that. That's a given. What really squeezes my lemons is the sight of thousands of people publicly Learning A Lesson, spunking themselves into a big frothy mass of self congratulation. No one is going to go away from this a better person, less quick to judge and more likely to give people a chance before they cut them to fucking shreds - give it five minutes and they'll be back to snickering at borderline retarded people who think they're the next Mariah Carey. But for that couple of minutes they were apparently all tender, kind hearted folk, generous to a fault and blind to the physical imperfections of others. Ahhh. Unassuming ugly person, you have shown us the way - now will everyone please undo the fly of the person next to them and join us in one big communal hand shandy? The most genuine thing in that video is the sight of Simon Cowell nursing a semi at the thought of the amount of money he'll make off this woman's back.

Altogether now: fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.

It's good to be home.