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The six most annoying conversations to overhear

ARE you stuck on a train, in a queue or a crowded cafe being subjected to the most tiresome conversational topics known to man? They might be one of these.

Film plots

Even the plot to Reservoir Dogs sounds like a snoozefest when recounted badly enough. Extra annoyance points if they keep doubling back to correct facts about a film that don’t really matter: ‘No wait, was it a helicopter? Or was it a plane…?’ The icing on the cake is if they thoroughly discuss spoilers for a film you were definitely planning to see. 

Children

When will people understand that things their children do and say are of zero interest to anyone besides the parents (and even then, it’s not a given)? Topics of particular, ear-bleeding dullness include: what/when/where/how many times the child pissed/shat/ate/woke up, and anything to do with homework or phlegm.

Dreams

Dreams – the nocturnal farts of somebody else’s subconscious. At least real-life stories have the compulsion of actually having occurred. Listening to some par-for-the-course dream about being stuck in their ex’s flat with Huw Edwards trying inflate balloons is too much to bear. 

Recipes 

Not a mouth-watering list of ingredients – that could be interesting – but laboured descriptions of tedium like making sourdough: different amounts of starter they’ve tried adding, various proving times, etc. Or they might be making something very simple exactly as you’d expect, eg. a pizza base topped with ham, mushroom and mozzarella.

Happiness

An idiot opining on the meaning of life makes you want to end it all by ramming a wooden coffee-stirrer down an ear canal and into your brain. Especially when they spout platitudes as if they’d thought of them themselves: ‘I often think that everything happens for a reason…’ Presumably then you’re listening to this trite shit because you did something bad in a past life, like torturing people in the Spanish Inquisition. Which, coincidentally, you’d quite like to do now.

Traffic

You’d think people could lay off boring traffic talk when they’re not in a car. It’s particularly cruel when you’re on a speeding train and you get stuck with a stranger’s blow-by-blow account of her nightmare drive to work. If you wanted the full experience you’d sit in the f**king car with her. Before hurling yourself into the road.

Why the pensions triple lock must remain even as Britain dies in flames, by a pensioner

BRITAIN, 2067. The cities are in flames, the countryside barren and lifeless. There is no government. The UK exists in name only. Only the pensions triple lock endures.

A handful of pensioners survive in bunkers, in remote cottages in the Scottish Highlands, or in hiding. And every year their state pension rises with either inflation, the average wage or 2.5 per cent, whichever is higher.

Why? Because back in the 20s, at the beginning of the energy wars, Britain made one principle sacrosanct: our pensioners must come first, for they vote.

And in all the years and events since – the London Drowning, the hurricanes and monsoons, the end of the Gulf Stream and the East Coast Ice Age – we have maintained that.

While our capital disappeared beneath rising waters, we reassured Chelsea pensioners on makeshift rafts that inflation would not outpace their income. While crops failed and the pound died, we made sure that pensions kept pace with barter systems.

Today, the only government infrastructure is the pensions office. Armoured convoys run out monthly to the few surviving pensioners, besieged by legions of the starving.

Inflation runs at 9,000 per cent and pensions with it. Whole communities exist around a single venerated pensioner and die when the pensioner dies. Respect for our elders has never been higher.

Which all proves that Britain made the right decision back in the 2020s when it decided to protect the pensions triple lock above all. The alternative is unthinkable.

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