Derisory Inquiry

Blog Hawk Down

As is customary for a Wednesday morning, the tendrils of the dawn light rip open my sleep and I step dry mouthed and dizzy from bed (nearly tripping over the hooker's corpse) and into the bathroom for a shower and a fag, all the while consumed with hangover regrets. How did a 'quick ale' in the Lamb and Screwdriver turn into a 8 hour search for liver failure? Did I really declare all cheesy snacks crack lined agents of the devil and start a fight with a bag of Quavers? Could it be true that spray paint doesn't come off tombstones? Does a whole bottle of rum constitute 'reasonable doubt'? I'm sure you know the feeling.

After a refreshing Alka Seltzer enema and a few hours on the sofa weeping and shivering like a puppy in an RSPCA advert, I'm back on form with a determination to forget everything that went before. It's in these brief moments of sobriety that I'm prone to ponder why any sane person would then wish to assemble a panel of their friends together the next day and joyfully pick at the carrion of the previous night's debauchery like insects suckling on a cream horn.

Why gather braying, giggle trumpet pals to reminisce about your indiscretion with a hose? I try to ignore times when alcohol releases inhibitions by continuing to test my theory that drinking Toilet Duck can induce amnesia.

"Sure thing Alan, lets meet up down the pub, re-live some horrors I can't alter. While we're at it, why not invite all my ex-girlfriends over to discuss my individual failures armed with penknives and pepper spray? We could bring along an old school teacher and go over my lack of talent, perhaps uncover the reason I spend my days morosely tippy-tappying into a keyboard rather than building a business empire, dating international catwalk models, selling T-Shirts of my face and establishing a private army? Is that what you want? Is it Alan? What good would it do me now, Alan? WHAT GOOD WOULD IT DO ME NOW? YOU GUSHING TURDHOLE OF A PERSON, ALAN. ...what's that? Yeah, I'll see you Friday."

I really can't understand anyone wanting to haul their conscience over the hot coals of shame and make bold claims that "it could never happen again", whilst simultaneously turning hair of the dog into an Oliver Reed tribute concert and getting just as leathered all over again. It seems to me that gathering more tits in one place than Jordan's Guide To Ornithology and discussing my failure to keep my trousers on in a nightclub, has no effect whatsoever as a preventative measure for future idiocy.

I suppose it's fashionable to have a retrospective inquiry into mismanagement, misdemeanors and mistakes despite the fact that the horse has not only bolted but has run out of the paddock, spent all his sugar lumps down the dogs and been forced to live rough on the streets selling his arse for glue. Every time things are buggered, we like to celebrate the fuckupishness off it all with a big inquiry party and pick over the bones.

Leveson, Chilcot, The 9/11 Commissionandonandonandon. Nothing says 'Western Regret' quite like governments screwing up royally and, fearing the public are getting a bit miffed about all this murder and mismanagement, scrambling to avoid actually altering their ways by having a good old hand wringing session at an inquiry.

The standard model for an independent inquiry is to get some dusty bookend peer with time to spare between AA meetings and thrashing his children to sit at the end of a long table and fall asleep while bickering law schoolers spout non-sensical guff towards minor celebrities (like the Prime Minister) and look very pleased about how much they're getting paid.

Everyone called before an Independent Inquiry adopts the correct facial expression (an alarming combination of seriousness and attempting to break the world record for holding marbles up their bumhole) to give their version of events. Although, oddly enough, their 'version of events' always miraculously points the blame in every direction other than their own. The inquiry becomes little more than a desperate attempt to cover more arses than the trilby department of a Topman factory. On top of this, the process goes on so long that independent inquiries now appear to be a new kind of endurance sport where the winner is determined as the person who doesn't die of old age before the end.

These thrilling sessions are usually followed up by a handy 30,000 page report that no-one bothers to read and half arsed calls for an 'overhaul' of something or other, leaving all involved free to pat their bellies in a self congratulatory way and put in an order for enough Guylian chocolates to double the GDP of Belgium. By this point the press and public are so disinterested they can't remember the thing that was so wrong in the first place that we needed and inquiry to investigate it, and the calls for the overhaul in question are highlighted on That's Britain in a hilarious skit entitled 'political correctness gone mad!'

My favorite inquiry of the last week was investigating the high cost of the closing ceremony at last summer's under 20 Football World Cup, especially the payment of $12,000 to retain the services of a shaman employed to prevent rain. As organiser Martha Ana Pizarro rightly points out, "It didn't rain. We'd use him again", a particularly encouraging outcome for me as my meteorite preventing tea-cosy is currently available to the highest bidder on Ebay.

It seems that people are now asking awkward questions as to why sinister executives enticed a terrified, pig fearing government to fork out cash like Scrooge McDuck in Vegas on enough flu vaccine to allow us to cut off the heating in every nursing home in Britain and still keep the residents cough free until the rapture. Various agencies are united in 'calls' for an inquiry, presumably by hanging about in the woods with a special whistle, hoping an inquiry rears it's head up long enough to be pumped full of buckshot.

In that vein I look forward to a future Mirror Replacement Programme where Tamiflu executives are installed behind your bathroom reflection weeping for your future and humming a funeral durge each time you look inside the medicine cabinet for Lemsip or moan about a vague feeling of dreariness.

Any hope that future generations might learn from the past by ceaseless inquisitions probably rests on our own ability to press gang nervous officials to act responsibly and with accountability, but right now it seems that repenting at leisure is the only way forwards. Makes you want to turn to drink, doesn't it?

Come on. I'm buying...

Solongandthanksforallthefish xxx