There’s a lot to be said about the modern world, a lot that makes it better than the past. We have better medical care than we had in the 19^th century (when the GP’ can be arsed to turn up for work that is), there’s also the innovations of the internet, space travel, nuclear power and so much more. We have many more opportunities than we once had. For example women can drive trucks and nobody bats an eyelid and gay people don’t have to live in fear (unfortunately neither of these apply to certain Islamic hell holes I’m afraid). However, that doesn’t mean that people have stopped having personal problems. This strand is to look at, in a tongue in cheek way, some of the problems that people might be having. All names have been changed/obscured in order to protect the innocent and not so innocent.

Let’s have the first letter to Auntie Josephine which is from ‘James’.

Dear Auntie Josephine.

I’m in a terrible state. My life is a mess. I’ve just graduated from a former Polytechnic that became a university with a 2:2 in Media Studies and an NVQ in grievance activism. I really don’t know what to do with my life. All the others who I went to university with did STEM subjects and have gone on to be offered great jobs in industry. Even those who studied Art History have found entry level positions in galleries and publishers but I am at a loss to know what to do with my life.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I spent the vast majority of my time in both Primary and Secondary school being utterly hated by the other children, which might have had something to do with the inordinate amount of time I spent in the primary school’s headteacher’s office informing on the other children. Although I didn’t have that good a time with my school peers, those hours I spent with the head grassing up the other children for speech crimes, smoking, wrongthink, drinking or reading inappropriate books were some of the best periods of my school days.

At secondary school the girls avoided me and called me ‘stinky’, because I am. The boys also never let slip an opportunity to put my head down the toilet. On one occasion I was found lying face down on the ground on the playing field with a bootprint clearly visible on my back. Neither the school or the police ever found out who did it and mysteriously every child in the school came to school the next day with new shoes or boots quite unlike the ones that they had worn the day before.

Sixth form was no better. Nobody invited me to parties and I had only one friend, another loner who was ostracised completely by the other teenagers following an unfortunate incident involving him, a girls toilet, self abuse and picture of Adolf Hitler. He wrote to me recently talking about old times from his new address in a place called Broadmoor. He’s asked me to visit.

I couldn’t get into Oxbridge so had to settle on an ex-Poly and a course doing Media Studies. Things were bad there as well. I hated the other students and they hated me. Also the faculty were none too keen on me either, especially when I turned up at their homes at three o’clock in the morning to inform them about which students had smoked a joint, gone clubbing on a week night, got drunk, told a rude joke or held non-prescribed political views. The shared house I lived in with other students was similarly awful. The medical student used to put bits of rotting cadavers in my bed, the Zoology student filled my best cooking pot with camel poo and I had to carry all my clothes with me to every class as if I left them at the house with the other students I’d come home to find them wet and smelling of urine. The only people who liked, or rather didn’t despise me were those studying grievance studies subjects.  Even they went on to get good ‘diversity and inclusion’ jobs in the NHS

Now on top of that I can’t find a job. I’ve tried everything but nobody wants me. I’ve even applied for the job of cleaning turd encrusted fatbergs (which is not a euphemism for Richard Burgon MP) from the inside of London’s Northern Outfall Sewer. But, I was knocked back from this job when the interviewer, after looking at my CV and personal values statement, decided that I might frighten the sewer rats into becoming dangerously aggressive. Nobody at any of my schools, nor sixth form nor my university will give me any sort of positive reference. When I sent out letters to request a reference from them I only had one reply and that was from my Media Studies lecturer. It was short and very terse and read ‘James is a c**t’.

Auntie Josephine I really do not know what to do. I am begging you for help in finding a job because my smell and my personal reputation seems to precede me wherever I go. Everyone has turned me down. All the armed forces rejected me as did everyone else and every retail, logistics or administration job I’ve applied for has also said no. Even answering an appeal from my local hospital’s amoebic dysentery ward for emergency cleaners didn’t get me a job. Auntie Josephine please help me.

Auntie Josephine replies:

Dear James.

I’m afraid that you are mostly the architect of your own misfortune. You are unwashed, unlikeable, spineless, love blindly following orders and a complete and utter misanthrope of the very worst kind.

You have no moral compass as shown by your long established willingness to engage in the sort of petty and unnecessary informing that would have shamed a member of the East German Stasi. You are the sort of person, who if you lived in a country under German occupation during World War II, would have been held in very high regard by the occupiers.

You are an appalling character. You are the sort of person who when you are around others they stop talking for fear of being denounced and who make people constantly look over their shoulders to check that you are not there taking notes on what they are discussing.

Your entire life so far has been a constant and consistent litany of being unnecessarily nasty to other people, spoiling their fun, informing on them and hurting them in whatever petty way you can. You are a disgrace to society and bring no benefit to it. Your only friend appears to be an onanistic Hitler fan who is now being detained at a secure hospital and it is only by luck rather than judgement that you are not in there with him.

I can quite understand why women will have nothing to do with you and why your student days were so miserable. After all if you can piss off the fun loving hard drinking medical students and have them turn against you then surely that should tell you something.

But I’m glad that you wrote to me because despite your obvious and despicable shortcomings I believe I might be able to find you an employment position. It’s not brilliant, you’ll still be despised and the job doesn’t carry with it the respect it once had, but it’s a job. I happen to be good friends with a person who works in a very very senior position in the Metropolitan Police. She has told me that a vacancy has arisen due to the untimely departure from her force of an officer who’s gone on long term assignment to one of Her Majesty’s Prisons and is unlikely to return to the force.

When I told my friend about you she was very excited. After all the qualities that you have and which would be a hindrance in any other field are, in certain sections of the Metropolitan Police, a positive advantage. The Met Police, having all but abandoned general normal policing, in favour of looking for speech crime and the like, is crying out for the sort of people that some might call ‘scum’.

The Met desperately wants people like you to sit on Twitter monitoring it for ‘offence’, to tear down politically incorrect football banners, to kneel for Marxist groups, to use batons and pepper spray on little old ladies at demos the Left doesn’t like and of course to mouth empty platitudes including the words ‘religion of peace’ following terrorist attacks. Her force needs people like you to indolently ignore burglaries or car thefts or criminal damage and sit at a desk serene and unperturbed by the rash of stabbings and murders that are occurring all across the capital. I truly believe that your sickening and appalling personal qualities could also be used to ignore eco-terrorists blocking the M25 motorway, steal either for the purpose of profit or to pervert the course of justice, the contents of the lost and seized property stores and generally bring no real benefit to the hard working law abiding population of the Metropolis.

My very high up friend in the Met has asked me if you would consider joining the Met. She does however have one proviso. That proviso is that you disclose any nicknames that you might have or had. She said that it might not be the best thing for you to have had the nickname of ‘the rapist’ as this sort of thing has, in the past been a bit embarrassing for her and her force.

I’m absolutely sure that the Met will say ‘yes’ to you and that you will be well suited for the sort of work that the Met do and continue to hold to the tradition of not doing the stuff that the Met don’t do such as providing the sort of high quality policing that Londoners really want. After considering your ‘qualities’ I’m sure that your Warrant Card, which is yours to use or abuse as you wish, will be with you soon.