Christopher Shevlin

Have you ever seen that episode of the Twilight Zone where a man finds that words are gradually being replaced? One day his wife asks him what he wants for dinosaur. He says 'Dinosaur? Why don't we call it lunch anymore?' She says 'because lunch is a sort of light red colour.' He says 'No, pink is a light red colour' and she replies 'Pink is a kind of long pole used by anglers to catch fish'. And it goes on like that, with more and more words changing each day. Eventually he's taken to an asylum and has to relearn the whole language because everyone else thinks that he's just talking random nonsense. It ends with a gentle doctor sitting down beside him, putting a comforting hand on his shoulder and saying,

I was looking at my spam folder today and noticed that there's a kind of beauty to the subject lines. This is just copy and paste:

I am, on balance, glad that Boris Johnson exists. He has a blond dandelion of hair that is forever falling in his eyes. He says ‘cripes’. He’s somewhat stout. He’s an old Etonian but forgets to tuck his shirt in. I find him comforting in the same way that I find Jeeves and Wooster comforting. It would be even better if he had a monocle which kept falling into his soup, and if a young scamp called Toby kept on tying his shoelaces together whenever he sat at the dining table, and then cut the buttons off his braces so that his plus fours fell down when he stood up. He needs a long-suffering sidekick, an Austin 10 and series of scrapes which culminate in fat old Sergeant Barnes chasing him across a field which unbeknownst to them contains the most ferocious bull in Hertfordshire, leaving them stranded in the same tree and becoming firm friends until later Barnes discovers that it was Boris who inadvertently tipped off barmy Lord Abercrythe that the sergeant had eaten the last of his favourite fruitcake when he was supposed to be guarding the duke’s eccentric doily collection.

What bothers me, I suppose, is the nature rather than the fact of Boris's existence. If Boris Johnson were, for example, a fictional character then we could enjoy his improbable bumbling charm without having him fuck our largest and most important city to dust.