E F Hay exists & writes stories worth reading in Britain today.   

Rather than slavishly following this sagging post-Imperial states’ spurious pompously ceremonial leadership, EF Hay finds it therapeutic to type out his uneasy ideas as strained fictions. 

He’d hoped his authorial perspective, stemming from feelings & thoughts developed in reaction to a minority spent in the depressing ugly margins of lower working-class subsistence, would be examined, considered, & interpreted by clinical practitioners offering professional psychological assistance.   

A little acknowledgement’s materialised: his stories have been published in print, eBooks, & e-zines; but so far, without any sign that salvation’s forthcoming.

‘Bullworker’

I’m aware, as a freelance scribe, that needs must when the devil drives; I eke out a grubby livelihood commensurate with second-rate wordsmiths, plying my trade in the depressing margins of our Anglo-Saxon mother tongues, journalistic & literary scene. And earlier today it was my dubious honour, to encounter Mr. Leonard H. Sell (MBA), who is managing director & principal consultant at Leisure Arts Ltd. He’s a stout vendor, whose business venture trades as a subsidiary; one operational cog in the wheel of a slick, multinational commercial consortium. Mr. Sell boasts brashly to audiences of assembled sales prospects, nationwide; bending lugs, prepared to sit & listen, about how the puissant syndicate he’s affiliated with, is planet earth’s sole wholesale distributor, of an internationally renowned, portable home gymnasium kit: evocatively titled, ‘Bullworker’. According to preparatory research: in compliance with official permissions established & updated from the southernmost tip of Lac Léman by the World Intellectual Property Organization, a specialist bureau regulated by trustworthy parent organ ECOSOC (itself located in midtown Manhattan, fettered & functioning under UN control), genuine Bullworker® products are marketed globally by disparate license holders, consistent with free market strategies in enterprise-friendly, regional jurisdictions.

Our informal Q&A session, arranged as an integral part of multimedia fanfare surrounding promotional celebrations, signalling Mr. Sell’s bold launch onto the UK market of an expansive range of trademarked aerobic accessories (most notably, Bullworker: Release the Beast Apparel), aimed at compiling supplementary campaign soundbites that would complement a series of full colour centrespread advertorials, prebooked to run over four consecutive issues of Pumping Iron Weekly. Thusly, strictly timetabled, I materialised mid-morning, as per instruction, at Mr. Sell’s businesses rented sublet, amidst the intercontinental grouping’s London based nerve centre opposite Kings Cross St. Pancras: an illiberal stone’s throw from a wide array of tasteful, cultured, blissful individuals, riding bicycles along beautifully treelined boulevards in Canonbury. Despite capital, to the tune of billions of pounds sterling funnelled into public-private partnerships (bounteous degrees of cronyism in aid of stipulated primary shareholders, which in this instance includes an Australian pension fund) delivering overpriced architectural gentrification to Kings Cross passenger railway station, & its immediate surrounding area, KX’s locale still squats like a melanoma on the elegantly styled crown of brainy Bloomsbury.

Slipping into my correspondent’s character, I calmly accessed Leisure Arts Universal’s geographic HQ (EMEA), entering its lobby via a typically no-nonsense, steel-glass corporate portal off a helter-skelter Euston Road. The headquarters front desk doubled up to provide FOH services for Mr. Sell’s private limited company’s profit centre; there, my humble press-pass credentials were checked, recorded, & announced by a 30-something female in corporate livery. Her tarrying stare over the top of a pair of ‘Jimmy Choo’ glasses allowed a meaningful-ish hiatus. Despite a slate-grey polyester uniform, everything else on show: her fake tan, powerfully lacquered hairstyle, permanent eyebrow definitions, remarkable facial piercings, bright blue contact-lenses, tattooed hands, & multi-coloured acrylics, screamed of someone adrift upon salty seas of simmering narcissism; unaware of themselves in any context beyond a superficial, emotionally stunted, rote perspective. Fancying myself as an investigative journalist, I contrived a chatty dialogue whilst awaiting door supervisor clearance, & Mr. Sell’s PA’s call from upstairs heralding his readiness to receive me. Easily flattered, my jaded interlocutor’s heart was adroitly opened by jaunty conversation. Permitting herself to be gently probed, she disclosed that heretofore, as a naïve eighteen-year-old, she’d fleetingly sampled advanced education; having pursued a so-called unconditional offer from Coventry University.

A Latin phrase, caveat emptor, sprang to mind. Moreover, nosing around Maltby Street Market last weekend, I’d overheard a costermonger bawl ‘if you want a guarantee buy a kettle mate.’ Nevertheless, without a warranty, this woman’s younger self formally agreed an ill-fated legal contract with the Student Loans Company (in which mademoiselle was identified as the chargeable component obliged to assume liability for the full & final settlement of her credit advance), that non-departmental public body subsequently ratified her financialised BA (Hons) Photography course. Its multi-genre syllabus combined theory, practice, professionalism, technical expertise, & conceptual exegeses in darkrooms for dummies; alas, she’d lacked adequate focus, aptitude, confidence, raw passion, ideas &/or drive to complete her studies. Partially digesting that degree, in retrospect had been sheer folly. Nowadays, with post-Brexit Britain’s exploding cost of living pricing subsistence at a premium, she was knackered; on a treadmill, uninspired to utilise her curriculum’s basic insights to conceive of related, sufficiently fungible schemes, deployable in other creative professions. Scholastic investments had turned sour, they weren’t sweet, nor in any way beneficial to milady’s petering pipedream, i.e. of stumbling across gainful employment that traced an exciting lucrative career path out of her dour, repayment plus compound interest plight. Hence, this failed lenswoman performed roles befitting a drudge; just another agency-wallah killing time, immersed in soul-destroying, wage slave gig monotonies.

As Mr. Sell’s busy morning continued to detain him, & nobody else awaited reception, I persisted: discovering that for the past nine months, this low-ranking front of house operative at Leisure Arts had dossed unofficially in her Filipina mother’s modest council tenancy, up a tower block on nearby Purchese Street. Also, how a Security Industry Authority licence qualifying her to labour as a specialist concierge (applying physical restraint & conducting citizen’s arrests as/when required), was acquired FOC via Jobseekers. Plus, allegedly, that said parent was content to indulge her prodigal daughter’s sofa surfing on the proviso that missy smoked fags outside over the balustrade of a fourth-floor balcony (home to a barren flowerpot that was mercilessly sterilised by pigeon shit & particulates), kept their shared bathroom clean, & their busted flush of a water closet unblocked (casual familial company presumably evoked memories of the old widow’s quaint, Southeast Asian village childhood). I certainly wasn’t striving to spread manure across her bed of roses, but pressing on, I established that this duff shutterbug remained a spinster; unbetrothed & heavily indebted. Furthermore, wholly unaware of her ancestral homelands toponomastic link to Hapsburgian Philip II, the Katipunan’s bloody anti-Spanish struggle, or US Secretary of State John Hay’s ‘splendid little Philippine–American War’ (during which, as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine, & disease). Inter alia, the prevailing atmosphere blurred, like low-end Lomography, as our intercourse segued from artificially perky, to silently awkward. I thought about offering an apology, but considering there exists no word for ‘sorry’ in the Tagalog language, it seemed a pointless gesture; happily, we were soon mutually relieved, as dicta for me to elevate arrived from above.

Travelling vertically, wrapped in a creeping fear that much of my time was foolishly frittered on academic tosh (which wasn’t central to a poor child’s wants or needs), I supposed my long-held conviction that broad horizons, some learnt history & discerning interpretations of data-based information strengthened one’s character, had just been illustratively exposed as a vainglorious daydream. As, if all scholarship, cognition, & Socratic self-examination resulted in was a lame acknowledgement of one’s insecure, psychologically murky, materially taxing continuance in a smelly precariat, & didn’t transport one anywhere better, then of what use were educated apprehensionsto lower castes like me? Fortunately, no additional precious time was contemplatively squandered e.g. imaginatively casting myself in an art-house rêverie, starring yours truly marooned as ‘Last Guy Standing’: abandoned by former comrades & thwarted from joining their collective socioeconomic progress (Guy an imprisoned antihero, stuck with Maslow’s ghastly, dirty, sloppy mother in her unsupportive role as a stingy, punitive cellmate). Saved by dingdong bell sound effects before any opening credits scrolled, the lift doors reopened, revealing my scheduled appointment IRL, who welcomed me with cauliflower ear lobes & an affected smile.

At first glance, ‘Call Me Len’ resembles a sort of mythical cisgender geezer who scoffs three whole rotisserie chickens per waking hour, between bench-pressing fourteen-hundred weights twice as often as not. But in mundane actuality, Mr. Sell principally confirms the nagging tensity in our synthetic world, ruled by innumerable illogical fictions, that a solution to one problem is simply the genesis of a dozen more. Undeterred, Len bulges indiscreetly through a stock-in-trade, off-the-hanger XXL salt-&-pepper suit; flirting, posing, yet enjoying scant capability for grandeur- communicating instead, in a serious, utterly unattractive tone. Not unlike a police constable bearing a standard-issue OB encephalon. Struggling to coherently balance being there, with what was apparently available, & on offer, I quickly scoped around Leisure Arts non-descript open plan office; its sole décor statement an ornamental gong (suspended alongside an accompanying felt-headed mallet), struck by red-hot closers who transact high value compacts. I was tempted to get percussive, as nobody among Len’s assorted hirelings was banging; ostensively, a congregation of dog-tired commuters, each in acute want of elevenses. Indeed, the prevailing mood portrayed a flustered, subdued workforce; telesales executives from dense metropolitan suburbs, conspicuously chipping away, at their own figurative coalface. Regrettably, I witnessed a lank, spotty faced youngster, analogous to a schoolboy, rudely dismissed after seeking assistance in call-handling a typical prospect’s objection. This scrawny kid was berated by an office manager behemoth; tent-dressed, loud, proud, & possessed of a granite hard resting-bitch face- disinterested in her puny ward’s pleas for occupational guidance, she scolded: ‘‘I don’t know, I don’t want to fucking know, so why don’t you fuck off?’’

Undeniably, certain ostentatiously adept actors theatrically personified the right stuff, creating an all-or-nothing aura in which inefficient, unreceptive, or un-admiring colleagues were summarily stigmatised as defective, & thus reactionary. As a reflexive response to the stripling’s public dressing-down, my hand extended to offer Len a cordial greeting. I coyly remarked how bustling business appeared to be, enquiring, despite myself, if he experienced a high turnover of staff. My query seemed to puzzle, rather than irritate, only for a moment, before Len clicked straight back into tub-thumping missionary mode: retelling a well-worn tale, outlining his products stirring heritage. Plugging its efficacy, he confidently imparted, with a clean sweep of his hefty right arm, that all Leisure Arts employees receive generous discounts on company products, & a private corporate healthcare insurance policy- pimped up by fiscal incentives. Citing a new government tax-relief program led us on a minor NHS diversion. In a fatidic register, Len advocated against poor planning inherent in any healthcare system based on clinical need, as opposed to an individual’s ability to pay; predicting that Britain’s anchor institution would implode in succeeding years. ‘’This country can’t afford a blessed NHS’’ Len fulminated, insisting all social funding to be tomfoolery, into which untold trillions of quid’s poured, without any tangible return on investment; characterising loony left social services as vast black holes of waste, throwing good money after bad. Len maintainedpublic sector monies inevitably evaporate PDQ. Crystal to him, was a dire need to ring-fence discretionary public services into non-mandatory, pay-as-you-go stratagems, with sensibly curtailed options, based on the sovereign judgment of a sound, transformational leadership: essential in underpinning sustainable excellence. Expressing in conclusion that the current crop failure of quacks at His Majesty’s Department of Health & Social Care, were completely out of their depth: ‘‘…jumped up social workers. A lamentable shower, unequipped to get laid in the proverbial.’’

The epitome of a hardnosed businessman, a chap who has no truck with heightened examinations into shared human values such as compassion, fairness, justice, & honesty (far less temperamentality, or romance), Len was well-positioned in an ideal part of town to consummate prostitutional fantasies. On expenses, I imagined. After all, telesales is a tough racket. Subsequently, self-styled strong men often present themselves as critical to the propulsion of cost-effective revenue growth, & revel in heading up Can-Do cults of target orientated pitchers. And for now, at least, Len preserved Bullworker’s RRP. Sales numbers were undiminished, & way ahead of shadowy unlicensed competitors offering cut-price, lookalike equipment on the dark web. Nonetheless, fierce challenges never fade away; a mogul’s objective is always to surmount & survive the next hurdle. Key to enduring prosperity, in a Hobbesian state of nature, is power: tactical, privately schooled, independent canniness; brutally disseminated by the fittest for bovine masses to follow to the letter. ‘’Serial winners never get bored by triumphs!’’ Len was on a descanting roll by now. ‘’In the realm of a champion there’s no scope for discordant cycles. Feasts can’t be spoiled by future famines, because uncertainty isn’t allowed to factor. Ergo, aspiring probationers at Leisure Arts must be imbued with a sense of our victorious, inhouse methodology. Rinsing & repeating without question. As master butchers continuously sharpen their blades; it’s a tried & tested formula: no deviations sanctioned, nor deviants forgiven. Trust me, history spawn’s aberrations, socialism for example, however, for the best among us to blossom, every servant of our faith must obey its diktats, & lockstep in line.’’

Is the vision the mission or is the mission the vision? I wondered aloud; in reaction to which he drew close, looming over me like a unbenign dictator, before relaxing, & in a masterful haptic response, took me by an arm- a prelude to announcing: ‘‘Come, I’ve more to show you.’’ Digression over, we moved into Len’s swanky personal office. Secluded by wood effect blinds, it afforded a handy hide from whence to spy on his pressurised telesales team. Facilitated by a neat PowerPoint presentation, Len proceeded to render slides, delivering a detailed show of sponsored state-of-the-art biological research, that claimed to prove the musculature of every denizen, in any advanced economy, requires & desires exercise. A healthy percentage of supine readers will be vexed to learn, despite their inclinations to the contrary, that their miniscule muscles crave ambitious expansion. So, imagine you’re interested in bodybuilding, & having tried a chest expander, gave it up due to repeated nipple tweaking- then prepare to resurrect your pectorals, & thank the Bull of Leipzig, Gert L. Dumbbell for the pleasure. Let me explain. Post presentation, butch Len appeared emotional; unexpectedly conveying his singularly melodramatic, tears-in-the-eyes honesty routine. Len spoke tenderly of was & when, wittering away whilst carefully setting up a vintage Pathé-Baby projector (incredibly unbroken throughout tumultuous decades) to screen a chaotic, amateur home movie. ‘A Silent Inception’, shot on black & white 9.5mm film without synchronized recorded sound (chamber fed & filtered by rotating colours), flickered fitfully from a rapid succession of moving pictures to disclose Bullworkers true creator. The colossal Dumbbell. I felt witnessing the gay antics of this big man (albeit that his unguarded gesticulations, & those of his boyfriends, were exposed via a low voltage electric bulb illuminating images on rolls of hand-cranked celluloid), lent Len’s monofunctional enterprise a human countenance.

As the transmission ended Len began recounting a moving backstory of its visionary headliner: Dumbbell (the distant grandson of a bicurious Potsdam Giant), who set lofty standards for adherents-cum-disciples to measure their best efforts against. This yarns late great idealist who, as his Deutsch contemporary Martin Heidegger observed, was thrown into worldly existence: an unplanned, unwanted lovechild; abandoned in the dusty foyer of a downtown orphanarium by a couple of dishonourably discharged Edelweiss Pirates. Spartanlike, Herr Dumbbell survived this place of rejection; worthily graduating from post-war Europe’s sternest school of hard knocks, where as an inmate he single-handedly invented principles of isometric contraction. Mock-up models, originally manufactured in tight-lipped secrecy, became standardised inside a calendar year succeeding Dumbbell’s pious release from central Leipzig’s Lutheran Civic Orphanage; carrying bureaucratic documentation decreeing he immediately commence repaying his home state for the care & education it had bestowed on him, by serving an apprenticeship in squeeze casting. Gert excelled as a tyro metallurgist; tracking the steep banks along White Elster valley to a local foundry, come rain or shine. But out of necessity, wannabe entrepreneurs in totalitarian statesexercise caution; Dumbbell conscientiously developed his brainchild during busy night’s spent in a discounted municipal lodging house in the city’s Jewish quarter. Soon, this callow, yet dynamic teenager, balanced risk & reward; making a market by drip-feeding unlabelled, limited-edition gadgets to an enthusiastic customer base, via a network of surreptitious middlemen. Despite apparatus prices spiking due to an inflating cost of hush money, & fluctuating hikes in commissions applied by intermediaries, Bullenarbeiter was an instant hit. The device added vim to humdrum lives behind the Iron Curtain, where one dull day followed another, punctuated only by desultory transpositions of light, for darkness.

Nineteen-fifties East Germany was condensed by primitive ideological indoctrination, hypocrisy, & hyper-normalised ritual materialising out of a gloomy command & control society, saddled with dystopian economics; ordinary careers were irresponsibly blighted, or lost, by suicidal monetary stringencies, bolstering unmerited prerogatives, & prestigious statuses, coveted by an entrenched politburo elite. Unbridled nepotism resulted in spiralling deflation that crippled high street retailers & the mensch on main street. Declining price levels led to lower production, renegotiated terms of employment meant fewer contracted hours, reduced wages & asphyxiating increases the real value of debt. Bullenarbeiter provided a handy outlet for folks’ pent recessionary frustrations. In equal measure, static contractions of muscle, without any visible movement in the angle of the joint, was popularly touted as an act of athletic rebellion: the populations effort to stay rugged, in a cancerous milieu of systematic enfeeblement. Archetypal Bullworkers started trading above their standard retail price, as Gert’s embryonic cottage industry struggled to keep pace with strong egalitarian demand, purposing his invention as a novel non-monetary asset. Uniform, durable, portable, recognisable & scarce. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Gert’s kit became widely adopted as a store of value; inspiring Upper Saxony’s lush young speculator to roll the dice, & undertake a daring escape to West Berlin, lugging two classic prototypes in tow. Gert’s meteoric ascent over & beyond Checkpoint Charlie represents urban myth & legend: DDR Olympic team members prepped with it, training for the Games. Even Uwe Johnson had a cheeky tug. Today, scientists & doctors actively cooperate across-borders to spread iso-type exercises embodied in the isotonic contraption Dumbbell dubbed ‘Bullworker’. Multiple major European government health bodies (scores of private Belgian hospitals too), routinely bulk order Bullworker combinations. The kit enjoys favourable mention on television & radio; accordingly, sales increase quarterly. Especially in fitness crazy, sunny California. Such popularity, along with a random bullying incident on Whitstable beach front, convinced me to seize this rewarding opportunity; to visit Leisure Arts, & learn all about isometric equipment.

Good grief! My unoriginal material serves to demonstrate the weasel words of a hack. And I confess, after staying schtum, nodding & listen to the full chapter & verse in support of Len’s unfolding spiel, I felt like a complete twat. Predictably, Len’s propagandised history scrupulously omitted salacious details linked to Dumbbell’s demise in a NYC bathhouse in the mid-1980s. Even if any revelation uttered by this tosspot proffered an ounce of veritas, independent of such, in stark reality, he’s a 300lb neanderthal (with anabolic steroids & a huge, thatched head stuffed full of ambiguities, vagaries & irrelevances) spouting bullshit. So, what the fuck was I doing? I’d hoped to live better than this. God knows how, given that virtuous behaviour’s a luxury conditional on the absence of existential threats. Of course, morality, between friends & family, is an essential social bond, yet illogically, this special sauce is entirely absent in our wider world of big business & politics. Personally. I’d survived an arid minority, riddled by domestic abuse prior to subsisting, shacked up alone in a single room, sharing facilities in some rancid Boomer’s HMO; hence, I guess, whoever declared the basis of an authentic relationship to be the autonomy of self, & the freedom of another, was a trustafarian.

Poor me, I’d embarked on my line of journalistic work desiring to become a conscionable sniffer & snorter- imbued with integrity. OK, maybe not Seymour Hersch, or Julian Assange, but someone solid, credible, breaking stories, not stones, in the greater public interest. Now here I am, reduced to the flaccid status of bum, bound to a boring descent into logical semantics & visceral decay; my damnation, a humourless parody of potentiality practicing its own oblivion. One’s levity-free travails, upon a pitiless wheel of misfortune, increasingly inclines one to question one’s purpose, when polishing reportage that nobody absorbs. Today’s menacing existential challenge: to pay for basic expenses, housing, food, taxes, healthcare & so on, forces me to take any freelance gig going. As a result, I cover far too many topics, structuring pea-brained articles for post truth editors idling at the glossy helms of vacuous trade magazines; into which, for tactical reasons I’ve quite forgotten, I limply attempt to sprinkle sparse elements of whistle-blowing copy, reflecting my ongoing cognitive dissonance. Yesterday’s deadline was a close-run call. Late last night I filed my monthly Trade Stock Investments Insider bulletin, ending said article with a bottom-line caveat quoting Paul Volker, who said something alarming along the lines of ‘…nihilistic forces dismantling monetary, fiscal, all democratic governmental policies, especially voting rights- capturing regulatory bodies, & the concept of honesty itself.’  Par for the course, no one bats an eyelid. A few troubled hours sleep later, in a complicit world of electoral fraud, corporate control, endless wars & Ponzi schemes, muggins here, is in the British Library with a ringing headache, prepping for this morning’s bog-standard pseudo interview (one I’m trying to type up before midnight). As ever, I aimed at ultra-professionalism, but struggled sorely in the sociopathic face of my host, a gargantuan, ham acting gimp- aka Leisure Art’s deranged top boy come second-hand sales-whore. ‘’There’s absolutely no hype involved, forget Charles Atlas’’ he shrugged, ‘’we genuinely supply precious, liberating commodities.’’ Struggling to get a grip, I questioned whether die wunderübung would work as well on a feebler frame than that of my interlocutor. Mr. Sell’s cheesy grin wasn’t born of embarrassment; it certainly was perfected, with brilliant white veneers, to convey a magnanimous superiority: ‘’Young man, you’ll achieve nothing without maximum effort in this world, believe me, I know. But if you look after your body, workout, persevere & never lose faith, then Bullworker will reward you with a very powerful physique indeed. And that, I assure you, will engender a healthy, awestruck respect from your peers.’’

Now, I’m not the earth’s most vigorous man; Len Sell more or less told me I was an ego-feeding, comfort seeking weed. Predictably, he offered me a Bullworker on a week’s approval; encouraging me to strive for increased power, to enhance my innate manliness. I was tempted, to suggest- tu quoque -that he tied a breezeblock around his bell-end, to enhance his. Upon second thoughts, I quickly reversed my decision. Not that I feared the big meatball. Let’s face it, for all his bluster, he’s more muscle Mary than ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser. But it struck me, that with the likes of Sell, rudimentary penis enlargements previously occurred: no doubt entering his propagator into a vacuum-operated device, bestowed on him when joining a Skull & Bones type, members-only, homo-erotic high school fraternity. From thereon, lecturing me listless in his droning copper’s voice regarding vitamins, vitality, & athleticism in general, Len smacked of a deaf & dumb snake oil hawker, whose muses re-echoed that my ‘not interested’ stance, in fact, registered a definite level of interest, which could be exploited. In this vein he exuded great fervour, pressing on my modest white-collar diligence (that’s transparently an Achilles heel), for leverage; trying to persuade me into conducting a spot of unpaid overtime. Adding with manly sniggers, ‘‘think of it as an abstract community outreach project, to salve your sharp sense of associative responsibility.’’ Len was keen I augmented today’s freelance assignment, by voluntarily attending a meet-up, with my South Bermondsey neighbourhoods Bullworker Fitness Group (BFG). He pointedly unfurled an A1 poster, advertising there was to be an informal colloquium in ‘Arry’s Bar, at Millwall’s Den next week. Astonishingly, self-appointed exemplars of ‘BFG Peak Performance’ considered themselves laudable enough to hold court. Whereas, on the contrary, observing the image of these mired souls, I descried a pitiable underclass, of negligible use to humanity. A blowhard cult of binary thinkers, offering no meaningful insight; contributing zero value to civilisation. Mere intellectual dwarves, leeching on our species innate creative productivity. In my mind’s eye, I perceived a motley crew of spandex clad goons casting glamours on one another as they stood preening in front of wall-to-wall full-length mirrors. After a little conflab with BFG’s steering committee, I’d be introduced to selected members; sweating flesh immodestly protruding out of mankini’s, endemic to poseurs & two bob comedians punting out lowbrow satire for facile fans. Cerebrally restricted types who struggle to engage in extended conversations, without sharing superficial references to mutually adored idols. Feigning complete ease, I’d hear about heart-warming gym journeys firsthand.What’s not to like? Well, I couldn’t help noticing Len’s breath reeked of protein. In fact, he unashamedly broke wind, without breaking sentence. It was the eggiest sort of a fart. He advised me, I quote: ‘’Eat meat, fish, poultry, eggs, nuts, milk, & cheese, as often as you can.’’

The mind boggles. As I tried to imagine a situation ‘where as much as you can/as often as possible’ would lead to a better quality of life for most of us workers (as we race, aping half-arsed rodents, in pursuit of personal freedom & happiness around capitalisms hamster wheel), the gross pen & ink of Len’s digestive flatulence, congealed in my nostrils. I felt quite ill; straining to withstand this uninvited gaseous punctuation in my unfulfilled life based on an incessant workload, & consumption triggered by boredom, I dropped my guard. Distracted, I hadn’t time, or the inclination, to swallow Len’s morsel of savoury pabulum, when without warning, he hoisted his hulking frame from off its immense arsehole & began jogging on the spot. To my horror, lurching toward me, he lifted me onto my feet to liven me up, & end our interview on a high note. Naturally I struggled. Unbalancing Man Mountain, together we performed a strange tense waltz across a few yards of leased office space. Hereabouts I laughed nervously, guessing at how girls must feel when, fearing they’re about to be carpet burned, while being overpowered by a rampant physicalist, intent on a ten-fingered grapple. I mean, had Len been quick enough to force me into a half-nelson, Christ alone knows what should have happened. Still, I may not be big, or strong, but thankfully, I can scarper when required. I’ve lived to recount this tale: spell check, word count, & email a sanitised, publishable version of it off, along with my measly invoice before anxiously awaiting late payment. LOL.

Summing up, in my revered estimation, there’s basically two types of merchandise on offer in today’s post-modern economy; fast feeding the Ecce Homo of modern exhibitionism which knows the price of everything but the full value of nada. Each is reliant on the doxa, stock rhetorical devices; radical commonplaces of salesmanship, motivated by modernity’s Deathwish culture of surplus over sustainability. One’s pukka, the other’s shmatah; I fear Lens adolescent dream-catching contrivance to be the latter. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. Don’t get burnt; the only eye-catching phenomena it’ll build’s a varicosity. Len’s truths lie in properties of statements. Reality yields much more. Don’t spunk savings, or valuable evenings, perched on wobbly plastic chairs in A&E. For determined wimps, well necessity’s your big bad mother of invention, & you ought to expect to pay no more than £599 cash, for top-of-the-range, signature powerpack combos. Don’t expect a box of fireworks; it’s not a simple case of lighting the blue touch paper & standing well back. Devoid of succour, as a self-help hobby Bullworker will prove a tad lonely. Releasing inner beasts won’t set you free, or spark a glut of career opportunities, extirpate the demons of Incel, seed charisma, heal a symbolic wounded child within; or magic up a magnetic personality, perfect for pulling quality crumpet. Overstraining through gritted teeth causes rectal piles, & attendant mouth ulcers. Good luck! You’ll need it, & a few soft cushions, antibacterial mouthwash, plus a sassy pair of flagrantly branded, machine washable support stockings.