I’m fortunate enough to not be a commuter. Those days are very much behind me and now I work from home, cocooned away from the worst parts of humanity… For the most part at least. However, on the few occasions I am brave enough to leave my electronic gadget womb, I ride around on the local trains with my head buried in the free paper “The Metro”.
Now, The Metro isn’t great. It’s a mish-mash of celebrity gossip, twee human interest stories and snippets of the world news laid out in the simplest of forms. They also have one of the worst writers working in the print media in the form of Keith Barker-Main, whose inane drivel induces a migraine faster than eating freshly churned cheese while smashing your head repeatedly with a clawhammer. But it’s free, it’s readily available and it beats staring at the army of slack-jawed, drooling drones or making eye contact with the ever tense fare-dodgers.
Despite my housebound nature the Metro has become part of my morning routine, not because of it’s insightful take on the subjects it writes about, or its posturing as a world news digest but because of its letter page. I like to call it the Moron Page… I am compelled to read it because if I ever agree with anything printed on it then I know it’s time to end it all. The morons have got me, made me into one of them, like the pod people from another world in the Invasion of The Bodysnatchers. “You’ll like being a moron” they say to me in a strangely seductive monotone “everything is so easy… Come and watch X-Factor with us.”
No. I can’t let that happen, so every day I trundle round to the local train station and pick up a damp copy before running home and mainlining it straight into my brain. The sheer relief when I realise I’ve made it another day without becoming like them… I can’t describe it but it tops anything else I’ve ever experienced.
Take today for example where someone has actually wrote in to make the point that the Middle Class aren’t actually better off than the “working class and supposed poor”. I wasn’t quite sure how, in a tiered system where by definition those above had more than those below, this would work. Fortunately for me Andrew from Bolton was all too happy to explain.
“These supposedly poorer people more often than not have Sky dishes on the side of their ugly houses, or new cars” he reasoned “whereas these are luxuries that the lower middle classes simply can’t afford.”
This explains why whenever I pass a council estate I see a bunch of rowdy yahoos outside rallying their beamers round a course made out of abandoned gold plated satellite dishes, quaffing bucks fizz made from Lambrini. Those decadent bastards.
Everything on this page is complete nonsense and once the relief wears off I genuinely feel terrified and remember why I stay indoors most of the time. This page is representative of the views of the people. They are out there and they genuinely think this way. And even those who disagree with the first set of morons on Monday do it for the wrong reasons in such a spectacular fashion that Tuesday has you longing for the previous days rationalists and great thinkers. By Friday you’ve lost all hope, but then the weekend comes and you have two days to steel yourself again.
It gets even worse when you consider half the letters page has now been turned into a sort of messaging board for halfwits around the country. Here they exchange messages and jokes that were texted to them by that other moron they know from their local pub. It also acts as something of an impromptu blind dating service.
“Hot guy who was on my train yesterday… You were wearing a tie. U R Well Fit. Smile back at me if u want to huk up”
– flirty, Aberdeen
Now, ordinarily I’d demand that The Metro be shut down for helping morons get together and breed, because that’s what they do with their dreadfully unimaginative brains. There’s too many of them as there is and I pray daily for a group of doctors and nurses who are so against the increasing numbers of the terminally thick that when they take the new born baby from the hopelessly dense mother they take it straight out into the car park and club it to death like a baby seal. It might sound unreasonable but trust me it’s the only way.
Fortunately though when morons leave messages for other morons, they do it so badly it’d be impossible for them to ever meet. No name, no distinguishing items of clothing mentioned, no specific location and they don’t even seem aware of the time difference involved in sending their message in and it being printed. Flirty from Aberdeen probably thought her message would magically appear on his metro, right there on the moron page, before his very eyes and he would look up at her and wink before ripping off his shirt and romantically sodomising her over the plastic table in front of a group of cheering commuters. (Why sodomy? Well, she’s from Aberdeen…)
It’s something that’s happening everywhere in the media. Even the BBC these days is inviting people from around Britain to send in their views, which is quite possibly the last thing you should want anywhere near the news. The people who send in their views are the same idiots who vote and look at what a fucking mess they’ve made of everything so far. Soon all the world’s media won’t involve expert analysis or informed opinion… It will be the views of Dave from Hertfordshire and eye witness reports that run like this. “What did you see when the bomb went off?” “Well, there was a big explosion…”
It’s just another slice of madness in our ever maddening world but in this instance it is one that you should let into your life if only to know that you are sane. Of course, if you find yourself nodding sagely with the geo-political assessment of Peter from Oxford it might just be time to make the awkward decision between that drug cocktail you always promised you take, or settling in for a life of X-factor with the pod people.