Name: Trainspotting.
Age: 21.
Surely sexually challenged teenagers and elderly men in anoraks have been hanging about at Clapham Junction for longer than that. We’re talking literature, not train numbers. You remember – incomprehensible novel by Irvine Welsh that, three years later in 1996, became a very successful film in the hands of Danny Boyle.
Dimly, yes. Why mention it now? Because chancellor George Osborne echoed it in his conference speech.
Bit odd to take Welsh as his inspiration. I thought the book was about a bunch of sex-crazed Scottish heroin addicts, alcoholics and criminals. Is that the Tories’ target group these days? With daily defections to Ukip, these are desperate times.
Let’s do a compare and contrast. What did “Sick Boy” Osborne say? “Choose jobs; choose enterprise; choose security; choose prosperity; choose investment; choose fairness; choose freedom; choose David Cameron; choose the Conservatives; choose the future.”
And Welsh? “Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life.” He put the words into the mooth – sorry, mouth – of Renton, the book’s central character.
Isn’t there a soupçon of irony in Welsh’s take on choosing life? Of course, though the chancellor doesn’t seem to have grasped the ambiguity. Renton thought heroin had a lot going for it, and did not look forward to a life of affluent Tory-voting bliss in Leamington Spa.
What did Welsh think about being Osborne’s inspiration? Not best pleased. He tweeted: “Would rather have Fred and Rose West quote my characters on child care than that cunt Osbourne quote them on choice.”
He’s misspelled Osborne. True. But he got the rest right.
Not to be confused with: Porno, Filth, Skagboys, the 2015 Conservative manifesto.
Do say: “Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae’s behaviour is outside its mainstream.”
Don’t say: “Has George Osborne taken leave of his senses?”
