The Archbishop of Canterbury on... King Charles banknotes. These are fake, right?

23rd August 2024

WAKING up on a cobbled street of back yards to terraced houses, my head feeling like the ecosystem of the planet Mercury, I haul myself upright and wonder what surroundings I have somehow fetched up in.

I run toward a high street in search of elucidation. It becomes clear, as I survey the pedestrians and shopfronts, that I have somehow been transported back in time to somewhere between 1987 and 1992. Most HG Wellsian.

I frantically approach a young man with a mullet to try and ascertain my temporal whereabouts. ‘Sir!’ I say, ‘Tell me – has the Berlin Wall fallen? Is Nelson Mandela still imprisoned?’ He brushes me off, brusquely. ‘Get yer fookin’ hands off me, or I’ll fookin’ bray yer!’ he growls.

Seconds later, I am joined by my private secretary, who has evidently been sucked into the same temporal wormhole. I explain to him our desperate situation. We must find the portal back to 2024 at all costs.

‘But Your Grace, we are in the year 2024. This is Doncaster. We are here on ecclesiastical business.’

Well. That explains everything. Our church business concluded, I return to London and my chambers to peruse a periodical. Therein, I read that the government are to announce a crackdown on benefit fraud.

Oh fuck my dead cat, fantastic! Let’s go after the real fucking villains! Not Labour-donating super-rich companies, but the benefit fraudsters, who cost us a princely one pence a fucking decade! And when we’re done with benefit fraud, let’s go after fucking beggars with unlicensed dogs! We can appoint a fucking Homeless Dog Licence Tsar! It’s the perfect bullshit policy for you cunts determined to do fuck all except ride around in posh fucking cars!

Elon Musk, the owner of social media site X, has once again urged people to stop calling it Twitter.

To which I can only respond: Twitter. Twitter. Twitter. Twitter fucking Twitter. Should we stop calling Twitter Twitter? Should we no longer refer to tweeting a tweet on Twitter? I’m not sure, I’ll fucking ask Twitter. Get real, Elon, you fascist spadeful of fuck! People will be calling it Twitter long after you’ve been burned alive 150 feet above the ground in a disastrous attempt at a solo flight to Mars using a giant flaming catapult of your own devising!

Talk TV host Kevin O’ Sullivan has discovered an egregious example of TV wokery, complaining that in the forthcoming series Sherwood, which he supposes to be about Robin Hood, the Sheriff of Nottingham will be a lesbian.

Yeah, except as two seconds of fucking research would have informed you, Sherwood is set during the fucking miners’ strike and has fuck all to do with Robin Hood, Little John or Friar fucking Tuck, you dismal fucking shitewit! If a normal human being had to have this explained to them on social media they’d blush until their fucking capillaries burst, emigrate to Africa and spend the rest of their life hiding under a rock in the Serengeti out of fucking shame! But not you, eh, Kev? Just another shovelful of manure to heap on the pig-ignorant fucking herd who pay your fucking mortgage!

Finally, it seems the new banknotes featuring the countenance of King Charles are finally finding their way into the cash registers and change of everyday transactions.

Seriously? People are actually accepting this as fucking legal tender? I wouldn’t! If there was a tenner with your miserable fizzog on my collection plate I’d reject it like a fucking £25 note or one with Nigel fucking Farage on it! You actually think you’ve built up enough credibility in your spectacularly unmemorable time as monarch that your blotchy, pissed-every-afternoon-since-1978 face is suitable for actual fucking money? Jane Austen, yes! Florence Nightingale, yes! Alan Turing, yes! Alan fucking Carr, yes! But you? Fuck right off!

A confused millennial tries to… keep his personal life entirely to himself

19th August 2024

By Josh Gardner, whose mother’s maiden name is Smith and first pet was called Scooter

AS someone who grew up with every recorded fact and invented fact a quick Google away, I believe in the freedom of information. Anything less is gatekeeping, which is evil.

The same goes for my personal life. It’s normal and natural that everything from my full location history to 12 years of poorly cropped selfies are owned and utilised by social media giants. They’ll put together an incredible highlight reel for my funeral.

Why should there be details of my life that aren’t public knowledge? When every twist of my last break-up, the minutiae of my health complaints and every tune I’ve ever vibed to is on the internet, it would be rude to conceal.

But, like all his weird, secretive generation, my dad disagrees. He stopped me posting pictures of my driving licence and dental records to Insta even though I’d spent arduous minutes choosing the right filter for them.

‘You never know who’s looking, son,’ he warned. ‘Why not put your phone down and do something normal like watch eight hours of TV in silence, like your old man?’

No, obviously. But he has a point. Would I be more exciting, like a teased-but-unrevealed new Brat collab, if I lived a life of obscurity like Kristen Stewart who doesn’t even have Insta?

Feeling I’d found a rich new vein of content, I decided to give it a try. Even as the first few seconds crawled by I knew it could make a killer TikTok.

To fully experience living an unobserved life, I popped into town. Bad move. Even on the bus I overheard a conversation that needed to be shared, had thoughts on my sexuality and belated realisations about the new Alien film. But I couldn’t tell anyone.

Is this how people used to live? Their every thought left uncaptured, their facial expressions lost? Keeping it all bottled in was driving me crazy. No wonder the Great War broke out just so Wilfred Owen could write his poems.

Just when I felt my brain liquifying, I bumped into a mate who asked how I was. Usually I would upload my whole Twitter into his face but instead, with immense restraint, I just said ‘fine.’ Remarkably, it worked!

In that moment a new way of life opened up before me. One where I could coast through my days without oversharing, making comments that come back to haunt me, or doing a little dance.

And while it was tempting to follow this path, I decided not to because occasionally algorithms use my data to recommend useful products on Amazon. That’s a sacrifice I’m not willing to make.