I’ve got the Gripes

My doctor prescribed a course of self awareness.

Let’s face it, gripes are not attractive.

If you meet a stranger and exchange shallow pleasantries and they start going on about the weather, the holiday crowds, the traffic, the fact that parents don’t discipline their kids, there’s too much immigration and it’s not like back in the day when you could leave your front door open, you generally want to nod, smile and get the hell away from them.

Everyone gets the gripes now and then, I’ve definitely been a griper, only recently when I foolishly griped about a sad bloke sitting in his silly sporty car in a supermarket car park with the engine running for ages, it really wasn’t worth my attention. I should have shrugged and moved on.

But I griped, and it made me look like a tosser.

It seems that recently quite a lot of people in the UK had gripes about being in the European Union, they griped about being ruled by faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.

I think that was the original reason, it’s so long ago now I can’t quite remember. Whatever the original reasons touted, the reality is a massive pigs breakfast of economic and social woes. It can now be objectively confirmed that Brexit was the most deluded, short sighted and self harming decision the people of this country have ever made.

One of the longer term consequences we’ve witnessed is happening right now. Due to the terrible relations our previous administration had with our nearest neighbour, France, and a deliberate reduction in embassy and consulate staff in affected countries, all thanks to the old lot who are now gone, we’ve allowed people-smugglers to flourish, take advantage of the chaos we created and make money out of some of the most desperate people on the planet.

And now these poor folks are here, some of whom of course have been traumatised in ways we can’t imagine, often by wars we started in their countries, certain politicians like scumbag Faragé and skid-mark Yaxley Lennon have made mileage out of it.

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen small bunches of often shaven headed middle aged white men with carefully implanted (by the likes of Faragé and Lennon) gripes about immigration, decide to smash up numerous city centres, attack the police and burn down hotels housing asylum seekers and of course libraries. You’ve got to burn books, rule one for riled up Nazis.

That is very extreme gripe-age. And of course one thing we are all very aware of is that all those shaven headed middle aged white men will all have voted for the UK to leave the EU.

All of them.

Now hold hard, I am not saying everyone who voted to leave the EU is a knuckle dragging racist pillock. That is a stupid, divisive thing to say and it is literally not true. Millions of perfectly reasonable people from all backgrounds, racial groups, genders, rich and poor, voted to leave the EU for a wide variety of perfectly legitimate reasons.

But the awkward truth is, every extreme right wing bigot and racist who’s been busy setting fire to bins and proudly shouting racial abuse because they’ve ‘had enough’ of being told that being a racist vated to leave. All of them. Every man-Jack-flag-waving-tub-thumping-shoe store-looting-vape-stealing-racist-tosser voted to leave the EU.

And I’ll add this, they have no idea why. They were told by vile posh boy Faragé, English tragedy throwback Rees Mogg, human bin bag in a suit Johnson and a large proportion of old fashioned British newspapers which, by some weird quirk, some people still buy and read.

It’s obviously very important that the rest of us remember that there are not that many vile racist thugs in this country, that was wonderfully demonstrated by the massive anti fascist gatherings that outnumbered the store looting drunk thugs by about a thousand to one.

It’s also important to acknowledge that the gripes of the white nationalist extreme right really affect a lot of other people in very negative ways.

My recent gripe doesn’t really affect anyone, it is so embarrassing and self revealing I’m genuinely ashamed. This is my gripe. Phone scrolling while sitting on gym machines.

I want to go on a demonstration, on my own probably, outside a swish gym, with a placard that reads, “If you are sitting on a piece of gym equipment looking at your phone for ages, can you please get up and go somewhere else!!” (It’s quite a big placard with quite small writing.

Yeah, double exclamation marks. That’ll get the message across.

This is my very rapidly scrawled version of an old cartoon, I didn’t have copyright to us it, but it’s clearly not just me with this gripe

I’ve now been in gyms in the UK, France, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, Australia and even Singapore, and in every one of them there is always someone sitting on a piece of gym equipment, silently scrolling through some brain softening social media app while I have to wait to use the machine they’re hogging.

When I was in Brisbane, Australia a couple of years ago, at a huge Anytime Fitness gym, a man came in, sat on one machine, looked at his phone, then moved to another, again just sat there scrolling, before finally moving to the lat pull down bench for at least 20 minutes, then getting up and leaving. He did literally no exercise of any sort other than use his well developed thumb.

There you go, there’s a gripe for you, I might go and set fire to my own bin now and shout abuse at my reflection in the kitchen window.

“You overprivileged middle class boomer, get over yourself!!”

Double exclamation marks