Time to lower the humour level to orange...

Last night I went to a roller disco at a local Student's Union club. I was terrible. I fell over almost instantly, fell over again when I tried to participate, stood by the railings for about half an hour and then decided to leave, falling over in the process. I have to admit, it wasn't one of my finer moments. But, of course, I was able to spare a tiny bit of the concentration I was using to keep upright to take a cynical look at the event.

I could talk to you about the fact that people had paid around £7 just to go round and round in circles. I could share a giggle about the old woman in the middle of the floor showing people dance moves they could use. I could rage at all the know-it-alls that glided around the floor thinking they were the coolest person in the world. I could even comment on how serving alcohol, a substance that eventually makes people fall over, was a bad idea at an event where people were falling over. But no, I want to mention the fact that, before I was given the right to fall over, I had to sign a declaration that stated that if I somehow died in there, it would all be my own fault.

This generation is riddled with paranoia. To abscond themselves from being sued, the event organisers basically told everyone that if they were injured, everyone else could only stand and laugh at them. I'm sure if I had broken my arm last night, I'd be more interested in getting some kind of medical attention than demanding the company to give me a bit of loose change. But, alas, that's just the world we live in nowadays.

I blame lawyers, myself. Ever since lawyers realised their speedboat comes as part of a pair, they've been doing everything they can to swindle money off people. Using exciting buzzwords and confusing legal jargon, they can brainwash anyone they lay their hands on to part with their hard-earned cash. Is it any wonder there are so many divorces nowadays? Happy families belong in the 1950's, not today's modern times, or so must the lawyer's think, which is why they make it their business to tell any wife they see that their husband is the worst human being in the history of earth.

Injury lawyers are worse. I once saw a court case where a man sued his boss because, having slipped over at work, his knee gets colder than it used to do. He could just as easily have sued God for making cold weather, or himself for being a clumsy bastard, but he sued the one person closely related to the incident that actually had money. If you want to go up a ladder at work, try sawing it in half, covering the bottom with orange juice, laying spikes around the floor and doing the hokey cokey. You'll definitely fall off, and your lawyer will definitely manage to shift the blame to your boss.

Of course it's not just the lawyers that make the world that little bit worse. Politicians are at it too. I'm not going to turn this into a long, boring political debate, unlike my last entry, but I do want to mention one thing, and that is 'terror alerts'. As if the world wasn't paranoid enough, we now have politicians telling us just how paranoid we should be. I'll wager fifty years ago there were terrorists, and the only kind of alert system was "we're being attacked" and "we're not being attacked". Perhaps it was even just a man in a high building with a pair of binoculars who, upon seeing a bomb heading towards the city he was in, radioed in and said "we're boned".

The introduction of a terror alert system shows us that everyone is just paranoid about something that is, let's face it, bound to happen at some point. People have attacked other people since they realised there were other people. Which means we're always under threat from being attacked in some way or form, so the terror alert should always be red. The terror alert system itself signifies that we're already boned. The colours are just there to determine how boned.

Until next time, my uncivil servants...ta ra!

Entering the polling station looking for Superman

So, the news is saying that Gordon Brown has announced he's going to "re-think" his policy on tackling government pressures. It's also saying algae turns Polar Bears green, but that's funny in a non-ironic way. But Brown re-thinking his policies? I wonder why that could be? Perhaps it's because since he became Prime Minister, everything seems to have gotten a lot worse, so obviously his current policy isn't working very well.

I doubt it's his fault, though. Our economy, at least, was doing fantastically well while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, so I doubt moving to the top spot somehow fogged his economic vision. Sadly for him, the inevitable crunch came about once Brown eagerly jumped into Blair's still-warm seat, so it looks like he'll be remembered as a terrible PM. Unless the crunch is beaten and the economy sustained while he's still in charge. I'm going to stick with him being a terrible PM then.

It won't be just Brown that gets the brunt of this criticism, however. Even though New Labour has done some fantastic things for us these past eleven years, as a nation we tend only to remember the things that we don't like rather than all the good stuff. It's always been like that, and probably always will.

When people remember Thatcher, we don't think about her great strides with improving the NHS, nor the abundant benefits of her privatisation policy. We think about how she was a horrible person who had some vendetta against the North. Or at least that's what history has warped her into.

When we think of Eden (and this is going back a bit, now) all we can think of is how he screwed up the Suez Crisis. We vaguely recall he had some mildly impressive policies, but they never surfaced because he had a nervous breakdown and had to quit, thanks to everyone shouting at him about handling the Suez Crisis as well as possible under immense pressure.

And once New Labour is knocked off the top-spot, which may be in a fair fews years considering the current calibre of opposing leaders, we won't remember the improved foreign relationships, we won't remember our economy being stronger than ever before, we won't remember showing the world Britain is still important thanks to the Olympic and Capital of Culture bid-winners.

No, we'll remember New Labour as a nanny government that passed all sorts of laws to stop their Sunday afternoon being ruined, such as banning fox-hunting to keep the noise down, banning smoking to keep the air clean, the devolution of power to Scotland to put an end to angry Scots phoning them up for favours, increasing the National Minimum Wage so their teenage son can afford a taxi instead of asking for a lift, and warring with Iraq so they don't get bombed while taking a stroll round the Lakes.

Unfortunately for Brown, this is the way we are, and given that he was in charge when we all ran out of money, we won't be erecting a statue of him any time soon. As with all PM's, when anybody opens the newspaper to see a string of bad news, they say "this is terrible, why isn't Brown sorting all this out?" For some reason we think our government is full of supermen who could deal with all our problems if they only decided to bother.

So I want to hop on the bandwagon and open up BBC News' homepage, and urge Brown to put on his cape and deal with the following; asian police officers fired for "racist reasons", 22-year-old paedophile "schoolboys", historic piers constantly catching fire, floods across England and Wales and a string of deaths and murders all over the place. Once he deals with all those problems, he may be well on his way to being a revered PM. But if he doesn't do his job properly, we may soon be attacked by green Polar Bears.

Until next time, my red-faced readers......sayonara!