Thinking of You

February is upon us, like a puppy fished from a frostbound pond, so it is time for me to mark the traditional Welsh New Year.

The world of broadcasting pants with gratitude, much like that aforementioned puppy, at the news that Terry Hall is taking over as director-general of the BBC on 2 April. So that's one PR humiliation missed with barely 24 hours to spare.

As always, I have some programme suggestions for him to kick off his tenure with rather more aplomb than was managed by his flourfaced predecessor.

The BBC constantly scans modern Britain in all its racial, social, regional and agely diversity for people who think exactly alike, then lets them loose on Question Time to peddle their grievances to three interchangeable politicians and a "comic".

But our national broadcaster is neglecting an important roost of the insulted and injured - the passive-aggressive community. It is the Corporation's duty to prise these pallid pedants out of the Sunday newspaper letters columns and into the spluttering fluorescence of fame.

I propose the following nests for their twitching resentments:

1. "Losers' Dinners". (The title is an homage to the late Michael Winner's ill-mannered sampling of a thousand sous-chefs' seed.) Normal people sit down to a country supper, only to find themselves assailed by the mosquito whine of self-obsession.

In tonight's episode: Battle of Britain ace Ernest "Belcher" Hogg takes his wife of 60 years out for a feast of pork shoulder, washed down with Alsatian hock.

The surrounding tables are occupied by wan Muslim converts, who tut with every forbidden mouthful at why Squadron Leader Hogg had "picked on the Germans instead of doing something about Palestine".

2. "No No No!" This is a very British take on America's marvellous "Mystery Science Theater 3000", a programme in which robots from the future jeer at low-grade Sci-Fi films - which means all Sci-Fi film.

In my version, eau-de-chat letter-writers with signed photographs of locomotives on their parlour walls sit through BBC period dramas, separated from the television by a Bovril-retardant screen, and squeal the programme name into the dog-whistle register every time someone on "The Hour" refers to the Sunday Telegraph ("No No No! It wasn't launched until 1961!!!!")

The season finale will have cardiganned army dreamers bolted into dentists' chairs as they project their dentures at a specially-commissioned Fox documentary - "Barnes Wallis: An American Hero".

3. "RSI: Miami". South Florida cops and forensics bods struggle to solve crimes using state-of-the-art technology, good-old-fashioned policing and an array of keyboards, wrist-wraps, lumbar-hugging chairs and height-adjustable desks that appear to have been designed by and for HP Lovecraft's inter-dimensional bestiary.

Episode One: There's a crazed killer on the loose, but Lt Caine can't lift his arms above his head - even thought Detective Duquesne needs help with adjusting her support corsetry.

4. "...Before the Americans Ruin It".  Now it's true the BBC already packs pairs of faux-teen haircuts off to Cuba and other telegenic tyrannies to prove, through the medium of wobbly cameras, that shiny clothes and infectious music outweigh anything Amnesty International might have to say.

But my orthopaedic reboot replaces vloggers in crop-tops with a phalanx of flavour-fleeing suburban vegans, and drops funky Vietnam for North Korea and worse.

Tonight, members of Camden Gluten-Intolerance Support are beaten up by café staff within minutes of arrival at Asmara International Airport, Eritrea, and again at the Hotel Roma, the central market, and later at a meeting with the Eritrean Catering Union (great opportunities for a CCTV/smartphone footage mash-up).

And then, in a rousing finale, they are given a good hoofing by their hosts at the Eritrean Vegetarian Society, before being escorted to the vibrant, colourful frontline with Ethiopia.

Press the red button on your TV control now to alert the border guards.

In Winos Veritas

The Mighty Norman Tebbit once compared our prime minister, Mr Cameron, to Pol Pot, quondam leader of the gangster element in the Khmer Rouge. Now even I thought Lord Norman had allowed his rhetoric off the leash on this occasion, as Dave and Pol seem to have little in common apart from cherubic looks and good connections at Court.

But the Chingford Cassandra has proved me wrong again, as the Coalition's proposal to increase the minimum price on booze is a measure straight out of the Bumper Book of Bolshevist Blunders.

I spent a year in the Soviet Union developing a humble appreciation of market mechanisms as the hapless Mr Gorbachev launched his reform programme in the manner of the Isle of Wight ferry - in reverse order and a miasma of hot air.

It's easy to mock glasnost nowadays, given its Fabian faith in patience and cooperation, but any attempt at marrying neo-Stalinism with a Quaker sensibility was going to provide piquant entertainment at the very least for the heartless voyeur with a British passport and return ticket.

Sage entrail analysts have long pondered the reasons for Gorbachev's failure. Did he promote political reform at the expense of living standards? Did he send mixed signals to liberals and conservatives alike? Was the Soviet model too atrophied to cope with even minor change?

All interesting, all wrong, for I knew perestroika was doomed on 16 May 1985 - the day the Kremlin hiked the price of booze.

The aim was to discourage the virtuoso drinking that passed for Soviet recreation, apart from the allied art of random procreation. In the absence of any decent television or many Jews to persecute, that left only football to keep the Russian punter happy.

Then Denmark beat the Soviet squad in the World Cup qualifier, and that was that for perestroika.

The price rise, coupled with restrictions on where and when you could buy vodka, beer and the Soviet equivalent of wine, was meant to turn the Great Russian Public into sober connoisseurs of didactic literature, fossilised ballet and slow-moving epic cinema.

The predictable result was a run on alternative sources of alcohol, in particular boot polish, flight fuel and the "Natasha" brand of perfume. This led in logical sequence to the collapse of the Soviet Army, Air Force and feminine hygiene, in so far as anyone noticed.

My Soviet room-mates Kolya and Seriozha would rarely venture far from their encrusted cots without a splash of aftershave around the chops and tonsils, just to keep them topped up until Sergei Kartoshka (Serge the Spud) returned from his collective farm some metres below the village of Kozloyobsk with several demijohns of finest King Edward Red-Eye.

If they made it out onto Friedrich Engels St at all, they would slick a couple of poltinniks into the green and furred paw of a mathematics student to sign them in on their Dialectical Materialism Theory Class before joining the two-hour queue for a bottle of flat lager outside State Gastronomic Emporium No.13 In The Name Of Mikhail Suslov.

With good timing and the serendipitous demise of pensioners and invalids further up the queue, they might be able to down a couple of intestine-pounding Zhiguli Lites and still make it for an impromptu interrogation course at the Rosa Luxemburg Nurses Hostel, only pausing to void themselves in an Afghan postgraduate's  hat.

Russians back in 1985 cherished two aspects of Soviet life that made Stalin, plastic shoes and exploding television sets all seem vaguely worthwhile, and these were the Red Army's Wurst-bursting victory over the Germans in the Second World War and the way Scientific Socialism let the Ivans lord it over shifty Tartar types and the thoroughly suspect natives of the Caucasus.

Mr Gorbachev, with the unerring step of a deluded somnambulist clambering into a wolf enclosure, then trampled over this remaining pair of patriotic pluses in his soggy bedroom slippers:

1. Instead of jeering at the Armenians' alleged addiction to propositioning poultry, Russians now had to hand over two weeks' salary to Chechen taxi drivers for a still-fermenting bottle of Uzbek brandy and look suitably grateful into the bargain.

Prohibition is also how local crime really got organised, so that it was flush enough in the post-Soviet shambles to buy up all of Russia's steel mills and our (association) football teams.

Mass racketeering and English public schools plump with Rolexed Muscovite brats had never featured among  Gorbachev's agenda points at the XXVIIth Party Congress, at least not according to the banner I'd ended up carrying in the Revolution Day parade that year.

2. Russian war films pre-Gorbachev were refreshingly free of qualms or any factual plotting in a way that Hollywood accounts of the same conflict can only dream of.

Hulking straw-haired lathe-grinders, goat-bolters, schoolgirls and progressive livestock would swing as one from the wholesome task of stuffing Siberia-bound trains with Polish schoolteachers, don dashing khaki tunics and pave their rapid path to Berlin with the skulls of cloddish Ukrainian collaborators.

The live skulls of cloddish Ukrainian collaborators.

The Germans were always skinny degenerates in sagging, sallow uniforms. High Period Soviet war films (1945-1956) would not even inflict the objectively Fascist German language on the gnawed and noble ears of the Great Russian People, insisting instead that actors should communicate in guttural yelps the sort of which Dr Moreau would have despaired.

So, no matter how grim their turnip-fuelled economy might be, the Russians could always seek solace in the prospect of the Germans still bartering their teeth for kindling in the owl-haunted ruins of Nuremberg.

They were therefore unimpressed to discover, through the magic of glasnost on their tellies, that Germans ate heroic sausages in dappled market squares, strolled around in clothes made of cloth, and had better uses for garter bands than as surrogate fan-belts for their space-age, four-wheeled cars.

And they did all of this while drinking foaming lager - yes, Germans can get lager to foam - from mighty glass buckets, delivered to their heaving tables six at a time by hearty farmgirls who'd lost the ability to fasten their blouses.

Suddenly, Stalingrad didn't seem such a bargain after all.

One morning I had joined Kolya and Seriozha for a troika - we each had three roubles, which was enough to buy the cheapest bottle of vodka. It was some special occasion - Seriozha had washed his neck, I remember that - so we'd decided to spend two hours in the booze queue.

After about 50 minutes of our smoking, muttering and round-corner hawking, a pensioner in the standard-issue damp brown flares, pigeon-daubed beret and cardboard jacket marched up, his medals for driving a tank over a pile of Romanian hussars glinting in the low winter sun.

"Out of my way, slackers!" he snarled, brandishing his get-out-of-queues-free war veteran card as he shoved through the steaming mob at the shop door. "I was in Berlin, so move it!"

He'd served in the Red Army, he'd used the palace at Sans Souci as his lavatory, and he'd lived for forty years on birch bark and bitterness. The crowd would have been instinctively sympathetic to him, having at least one such Spartan each in their families. But along came Gorbachev and his Dry Law, and everything was changed, changed utterly.

He emerged from the shop clutching two open bottles of Zhiguli. He necked half of one right in front of us, retched, then spat it out over an audience of sparrows.

"Pisswater!" he gagged. "To think I fought the Germans for five years - one of them on my own - so that I could drink this muck. Bollocks!"

Pisswater or not, it was more beer than the rest of us had, and the mood of the crowd was restless. Then one voice rang out:

"Think - if you hadn't fought so hard, grandad, we'd all be drinking Bavarian Pils right now!"

I braced myself for the inevitable lynching. No one in the Soviet Union joked about the Nazis' winning the war.

But instead there were a murmur of appreciation, then laughter and a brief round of applause. The Hammer of the Goths shuffled off, trailing his bottles behind him. Mr Gorbachev and Soviet power followed suit, six short years later, to be replaced by the ever-thirsty Boris Yeltsin.

Perhaps Mr Cameron should put his feet up on Mr Clegg one evening and ponder these lessons of history. Ed Miliband may be a Diet Coke kinda guy, but out there in the heaving darkness you can just make out the embers of Ken Clarke's cheroot.

Scott of Arabia

My forthcoming novel:

A mix-up at Thomas Cook finds Capt Robert Falcon Scott and his chums deposited on the shores of Arabia Deserta.

Undeterred by blistering heat, expiring huskies and the constant chafing of sand under their thermals, the men of the Terra Nova Expedition trudge off, Aqaba-bound, shod in tennis rackets and furs.

With foul pipes clenched in sunbleached teeth, they drag sleds of fermenting pemmican and donkey corpses across the Devil's Anvil.

Salvador Dalí, a young Catalan artist diverted from Tangiers by a Cox & King's clerk with a loathing for Modernism, strokes the unshaven half of his chin thoughtfully, and pens a pneumatique in betel juice to Luis Buñuel.

But, as Scott approaches the Red Sea to turn the Turkish guns, he sees a Norwegian flag fluttering above the Mameluke fort...

Meanwhile, a North German Lloyd cruise ship debouches etiolated Welsh invert Capt T.E. Lawrence near Ross Island, Antarctica.

His white robes billow in merciless squalls while he pitches a tent of sheer muslin. Lawrence squints into the ebbing Sun. His etchings and easel fly out across McMurdo Sound.

"I shall name this frigid landfall Cape Dahoum..." he apostrophises an iceberg, just as an orca describes a perfect arc through the inky skies and snaps his head off.

Lawrence's body teeters on the marbled strand for a moment, before toppling into the deep.

Integrae servandae

BBC types, like Eastenders, the panda-eyed weatherman in Groundhog Day and wrong-trousered Alpine symphonist Anton Bruckner, wake up every day and make the same mistake, as I've noted before.

They derided my advice over Brand, Ross & Sachs - who really should be a firm of Borders solicitors specialising in sheep-rustling - and spurned it over Savile.

In the hope that they might listen this time, I'm suggesting that they should grovel to the Tories gangbang-style by handing over their news output to The Royal Horticultural Society, broadcasting proper war films all day on BBC4, and launching the following right-thinking programmes elsewhere:

Police, Camera, Traction!

BBC3: Warning from History Jim Davidson comments wryly on webcam footage of minor villains being helped down the back stairs of Britain's busiest police stations, then takes some ratepayers and mental patients round to visit them in hospital.


Moominsummer Murders

CBBC: Inspector Hemulen and Det Sgt Groke drive around Moominvalley in a vintage motor, eating berries and scattering Snork Maidens like petals.

Episode 1: Mrs Fillyjonk is found impaled on her own broomstick. Hemulen and Groke supercharge some Hattifatteners and lie in wait in the Lonely Mountains until springtime, for Romany rover and therefore prime suspect Snufkin to come rambling through.  

I'm a Celebrity, Get It Out Of Me!

BBC1 & Interactive: Viewers with shires phone numbers select dyed women and men with piercings from off the telly, who are then literally carted off to Clun for the recently relegalised Marches Eel Festival.

Revenue raised from DVD and programming sales worldwide will more than cover the inevitable legal fees, and Newsnight and Panorama can spend all year investigating leaks of the uncut footage onto the Internet.

Next!

We'll Keep a Whetstone in the Hillsides

We met beneath the pigeons at Reading Railway Station - Sioba Siencyn, Iago Anffawd and I. We paused, for the Spirit of the Sesh had descended upon us. Far from silently, we set off for the "Яevolution" bar on Station Rd to commune with our profound Cambritude.

Subterreanean lakes of ale were siphoned through our slate-slaked systems as we laboured on the screenplay for a Welsh James Bond film. Little survived of my notes the following day, apart from "HELENA BONHAM CARTER - LESBIUN!" scrawled on my forearm in Żubrówka.

But I do recall a scene in which we imagined the childhood trauma that warped the Welsh Bond into working for MI6. Being abandoned in a slate quarry by troglodyte parents would be one:

[Dark interior of the Llechwedd Slate Mine, Blaenau Ffestiniog. A small boy in grey flannel shorts, blazer and cap stands alone, holding a gently deflating balloon. A canary perched on crag provides the sole splash of colour as water drips hollow from the walls]

Boy [plaintively]: "Mam!"

[The canary falls dead at his feet]

Siencyn and I knew Blaenau well. He, a southerner from sunny Llanishen, had been scared sobbing to his brackish bed by tales of the Bwgan Blaenau - a trouserless quarryman who sharpened insolent children into bradawls for the splitting of the slate.

I had often peer through the clouds crowding over far Ffestiniog and thanked Hendwrch, the Badger God of Unforeseen Coupling, that I was a native of neighbouring Dolgellau.

But Iago was different. Like his native Swansea, he burned with the brio of sodium in a swimming pool - fast and fierce, but warm and always watchable. He decided that we were brandishing the Welsh-speaker's sawn-off sense of humour in Blaenau's general direction, thinking that we complain and denigrate solely to indulge and exalt.

For one of the few occasions in the history of our crab-clawed country we were in fact being totally and utterly honest  - a word that did not even exist in Welsh until we filched it from the French. That's right, from the French. Iago trusted in our duplicity, and we let him down.

Even the all-embracing National Park shuns Blaenau. A sooty enclave within the painted playground of Snowdownia, it has few links to the sunlit lowlands beyond a steam railway and the unicycle path over the Crimea Pass hewn by circus fugitives.

Blaenau is industry's vision of that disembowelled baboon in Cronenberg's "The Fly". It is Wales's last revolt against progress, and a warning to the curious geologist.

A few weeks later Siencyn and I were relaxing with some mushroom flummery among the oak garlands of our living room, when the telephone rang. We stared it for a while. Siencyn picked up Pshîla the cat and pressed what he thought was re-dial before I found the receiver and yelled a greeting over the cacaphonous Celtic Katzenjammer.

"It's me Iago, mun!"

"Arright Iargs, where are you? Pshîla's got Siencyn in a five-point pindown and the nettle brandy's taking the edge off my evening. so why don't you pop round? Bring the missus."

"Can't. We're both in bloody Blaenau Ffefuckingstingiog."

"?!"

"Second honeymoon. Surprise for Kylie-Marie, like."

"In Blaenau?! Bet she's delighted. Don't you remember what me and Siencyn told you about the rain, the slate, the Council Scousers whining in the slagheaps, the Sundays, the consonants - Oh God! the consonants?"  

"I thought you was joking and it's really some Tenby in the sky. Kylie-Marie could be crying, but I can't tell 'cause of the rain. And we're indoors."

"Well, Iago bach, I'd love to chat all night but this perique won't smoke itself, so -"

"We need your help mun!"

"Again, Iago, I'm several hundreds of miles away, simultaneously and at the same time overstimulated and sedated by fermentation and fungi, and own neither a car nor a sense of empathy, so once again -"

"Can you just tell us where to get something to eat? We're in this guest house, and they laughed when we asked about dinner. Laughed without opening their mouths..."

Iago had once spent an evening buying drinks for an "SAS officer" whose convenient knowledge of Welsh had helped him recruit the "Tibeeshans" of Tibet to imaginary espionage. Sending the boy into a Blaenau pub would lead to his having "Deddf Eiddo!" tattooed on his intestines with a tool fashioned from his own overdeveloped coccyx.  

"Drive down to 'The Grapes' in Maentwrog," I counselled. "The village is twinned with Roger Corman's out-takes, and you can expect the longest silent stare since the doomed London type arrives in the Cornish pub in Hammer's splendid 'The Reptile', but they do pre-killed food and the main road to Minfford and freedom is but a black and lurid tarn away".

"We got here and was so shocked that we just smoked this bag of weed and now we can barely move. What we going to do?"

"You could send out for fish and chips, but don't ask for scampi - some of the blokes who come up for air from Llechwedd feel for amphibians and might track you down. Your wife is a woman - surely she must have some chocolate?"

"Like I said, we're half-Marleyed so the Valleys Family Pack of Revels is long gone. Plus the freezing fog keeps the blow swirling at knee-level, or chest-height for the staff, so everytime we try to go downstairs we gets another hit. It's mental."

I thought hard, then rapped out a number. "This is my brother Morthwyl's phone. Just say the following - 'Blaenau. Stoned cormorant. Bird's yours. Duw ffyc aye'. Ignore the gnawing sound. He'll find you. Now hang up."

Morthwyl located the creature that had once been Iago deposited at "The Brondanw Arms" in nearby Llanfrothen, a hamlet celebrated throughout Wales for having expelled its vicar in the 19th century - from the business end of the giant Sumatran rat that the Independent Calvinist-Methodist (Calvinist) minister has raised like a son, rumour has it.

A word with the Assembly Government, and Iago got a job fashioning Welsh-shaped marital aids for the enervated satraps of Umm al-Quwain. Parts of him feature on a series of Emirati postage stamps.

Kylie-Marie stayed in Maentwrog, where she entertains the impious with her cimbalom at the 24-hour graveyard. And as for the good people of Blaenau and Llanfrothen, they sing and dance and await their next visitors at dusk.

Blind Narcissus

Facebook, the simpleton's way to start your day, has let the mask slip of late. Big-palmed creator Mark Zuckerberg pitched it as a sort of computer smoothie - no chemicals, no plastic wrapping, no monthly book selection blocking up your letter box, no bailiffs biffing your old gran because you skipped the small print.

Its acolytes sailed gaily through the Gates of Spontaneous Order, eager to share their news and photos with friends they don't see every day. But this band of pure users has long been smothered in the mental dandruff of:

• Night bus nightmares lacking the trip-switch betwixt brain and fingers
• Brazen blogpost pluggers like me
• Playground showoffs impressing the girls with their update push-ups
• Link jockeys with news and weather updates for people who don't have Internet access, and 
• Bored secret policemen.

The difference between the early innocents and these human retreads is motive. The former want to share; the latter need to sell. Now that Facebook is stuffed with hand-me-down opinions and stale jokes, Mr Zuckerberg has set aside his bucket of soda and commanded the macro-minions to slip back into their "Yo La Tengo" t-shirts and get messing with some minds.

My favourite coarsening of the Facebook grain is the "Highlight" button. This lets buffoons shuffle their latest brain daubs to the top of his friends' feeds for a small fee and no conceivable reason. Those who avail themselves of this new service might find it cheaper and more effective to change their avatar to an animation of an endless deflating phallus.

I'm reminded of the lager pump in Reading's Hobgoblin pub (now the Reading Alehouse - flavoursome as ever but far less intimidating). This establishment still caters exclusively to men in beige who gave up on women when Felicity Kendall married and now dedicate themselves to flat beer and books with gnomes as the protagonists.

A student absorbed in mobile phones and dance music might occasionally press through the fog of halitosis, survey the barrels of Old Hedgefumbler and alight with relief on the cheery, elf-free Fosters label.

"Pint of Fosters, please!" he'd chirrup.

The matted mass of sinew, soup and Ulster Scots belligerence that was Paul, the crepuscular landlord, would then ring the Lager Bell, and all would gather round and mock.

The Highlight button is Facebook's Lager Bell, a tool for showing others you're a tool.

Another sign that Facebook is toying with its creatures like a kettle-wielding toddler bestride his ant farm was Mr Zuckerberg's twin decision to float the company on the stock market then get wed. These two acts are calculated to sweep all Facebookers into a handy tray of rage.

Users see Facebook as a self-sustaining anarchist cooperative of fisherfolk, where money has long yielded to black flags and free love - or at least amusing photographs of the like. They don't like markets, unless run by tie-dyed white-flighters posing as farmers, and they certainly don't like their blow-up Internet doll being sold as someone's dowry.

But Mark Zuckerberg's most galling gag, set up long before he careered off in his ironic "Just Married!" titanium Heinkel bubblecar, was Timeline. One morning you log on, and your neat ribbon of thinks has been spliced and jammed like some hipster's birthday party retro mixtape.

Some sigh and live with it, others flee to Google+ ("Where The Manager's Golf Buddies Are"), and the rest go all haiku and lose themselves in Twitter. Luis Buñuel shot his films in a linear fashion - I imagine because he wanted to know what happened next - and Facebook has blundered into the hag-haunted halls of hubris if it thinks it's further out there than Spain's top Surrealist and smoker.

So how can Mark keep us down on his farm now that he's seen Gay Paree? One way would be to adopt my Update Displacement and Disclaimer Editorial Reversal System (UDDERS). How does this work?

In its present, pedestrian configuration, Facebook allows the user to post and delete their own updates, and merely like, dislike, share or comment on others. UDDERS works in reverse. It allows you  to post solely on the feed of others and, by the magic of hacking, via their IDs.

This is much more like it. Imagine four old friends - John, Paul, George and Ringo. It's easy if you try. John is a bit of a dick and packed full of mordant conscience. Most of his chums quietly block his updates, so how can he get across these urgent views on Vietnam, hair and decreasingly imaginative music? Well, UDDERS allows him to post as, say, Paul.

Paul is a bit of a dick but clings to a shotglass of self-awareness that keeps his ideas about Ireland and meat largely to himself. Consider the interest, then, if updates like "Playing for HM The Queen's Jubilee! Fantastic!!" and "Playing at the Olympics! Fantastic!!" were superseded by "Hey Mr Obama, yer Agent Orange gives me the blues!" That's one deep cavity search booked at JFK next time Paul plans to give his regards to Broad St.

Or take Ringo. He's a bit of a dick, but affable enough when he concentrates on Bond girls and practicing his signature. Unlike John, he doesn't want to force his helium opinions on others. Like all drummers, he is one of life's terrible simplifiers - if you don't believe me, listen to Buddy Rich's version of Birdland - and so prefers the "altruistic elimination" application on UDDERS that allows you to delete other users' posts.

George is a bit of a dick - lives on a trampoline in Henley - but funds terrifically tasty films. Ringo deletes all his posts, replacing them with "Peace and Luve", and George really doesn't mind. Everyone's happy.

I have other ideas for applications to make Facebook a site fit to loll in:

1. The Political Chameleon. A young lady asks to befriend you, and you idly wonder whether she might be a nympho whose father owns a brewery. She earnestly comments on a cheek-streaking array of stuff. You have neither the time nor inclination to read them, but would like to leave either a pithy comment or knowing link to keep her sweet.

Lo - the Chameleon codes her updates by colour and shape, so you know where she stands and you may stoop.

• Red Wedge = Old Left: trade unions, banners, her lips move when Ed Miliband speaks.
• Red Crescent = WikiLeaks Left: trustafarian or Oxbridge-via-pinched-suburbs. Media fringes, Trotskyist blogs, hates daddy.
• Green Thorn = ditto, but lives in Brighton.
• Grey Goth = Occupy, Obama, Ovaries.
• Blue Frigate = Rugby Club Right: Clarkson stalker, strike breaker, loves daddy.
• Rainbow Vortex = Cthulhu Central: Ayn Rand, Ron Paul - Run Miles.

You might manage to steer a Frigate into harbour, but you'll be hosing down the docks for weeks afterwards. Otherwise look out for the Pink Glove (Blairites) or Swedish Flag (Coalition) - they're all looking for love right now.

2. Automatic Arguer. You post something bold and arresting, such as a merged photo of Presidents Bush and Obama, or a European Union flag with a For Sale sign on it, hoover down a can of lager and await the debate. But nothing happens, apart from a few "likes" and "uh-huhs". You've hit rock-lobster bottom on the Shelf of Self-Knowledge with a clammy slap, as all your Facebook friends - apart from the Japanese cosplayer you suspect might be your old chemistry master - clearly share your scintillating Weltanschauung.

That's where Automatic Arguer comes in. The free app generates ill-humoured snarls, threats to defriend, or photographs from children's hospitals in your target country.

But for a small fee it will post your erudite update on the wall of the Middle Eastern political movement you'd least like to be kidnapped by, embellished with some swastikas, Stars of David or amusing fusion of both, along with a composite of your profile photo having good times with their best daughters.

Then it will disable your "mute" button and sign off with your home address. In Comic Sans.

3. We Live As We Dream. Depression is the Plimsoll Line that divides healthy societies from Britain. Post something about bipolarity and your American friends will offer all sorts of encouragement. But from the Tamar to the Thames comes the sound of distant shuffling. Why? Beats me, but here's what to do.

Install this app, as it's ideal for the chatty melancholic. If there's an election, weather event or excellent new film going down in America and you simply can't find anyone on Facebook to put their arms around your updates, click on one of the three settings to get the desired result:

• Sympathy. This hacks various friends' accounts and sends you inspiring thoughts etched on stock photos of domestic animals at sunset, and makes your laptop smell of chocolate.
• Retired Colonel. Comes in "2nd Duchess of Gloucester's Own Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire Battalion" or "US Marine Corps" modes. One counsels brisk walks, cold showers, thinking of the regiment and marrying well. The other suggests that you might want to drop something and give him twenty thereof.
• Head Tilt. When words only wound, this tips all the photos on Facebook by a reassuring 25 degrees.

Please note - despite some persistent complaints, there is no Voices In My Head setting. It just means you've stumbled onto Twitter.

.

Recoil after Volleyball

I missed the Olympic opening celebration of Britishness, because I fell asleep reading a Max Hastings book. That's how Daily Telegraph I am.

Danny Boyle did himself proud, I'm sure, but only if his show featured:

• Steptoe & Son;
• couples taking their dogs for romantic weekends in Cotswold hotels;
• Mrs T trailing a bottle of Bells about her bedroom, wearing slippers made of Argies and miners;
• students trying to force down a Guinness;
• Ollie Reed mumbling an apology to an understanding Eddie Izzard;
• pink-eyed kids marching down a Newcastle street, playing kazoos;
• synchronised tutting;
• Sir Sean Connery wearing one of the Scottish man-skirts, pissed on a Marbella beach;
• The Question Time audience waking up in Iran;
• Shaky wrestling Richard out of Richard & Judy; and
• Edward VIII finding out the hard way that Wallis Simpson was a man.

All narrated by the ghost of John Osborne. Anything less, and we might as well be westerly Dutchmen.