In the interests of political balance, S&C has appointed a new columnist who tells it how it is and doesn’t care who he offends. Whatever you’re thinking he’s thinking but, unlike you, he has the courage to say it out loud. He’s always right and in at least two senses of the word. He is Reg Chrettyn.
Portsmouth. Isn’t it great? Aren’t we great? No one comes near us. No one. No mush at all. Especially not the scummers.
What’s not to love? Cream tea on the Common. Full English on the Pier. White Lightning on Fratton Road. Salt on your chips. Salt of the earth. Salt in the sea. The Royal Navy. The Royal Marines. Our brave boys on the P&O ferries. Old warships that handed the Frenchies’ arses to them in a high hat. A ruddy great tower that looks just like another one in a nasty foreign hell-hole we flog weapons to. Play up Pompey. Cliff the Dancing Man. The Chubb Lock. Bloody brilliant.
Charles Dickens. HG Wells. Rudyard Kipling. Mike Hancock. Colin Galloway. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Donna Jones. Roger Black. Harry Redknapp. (Sort of. For a bit.) Peter Sellers and Peter Griffiths. John Pounds and John Ferrett. Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Richard Chamberlain (possibly). Heroes all. All of them heroes. Them all heroes.
Oh, and Winston Churchill Avenue. The man’s a hero, not the road. Obviously.
Problem is, readers, some folk round here aren’t heroes. They’re the opposite of heroes. They want to wreck our rep. They talk us down. Or they make us look bad. They hate us. They hate themselves. They hate everything. All of it.
Who am I talking about? For starters, the homeless camped outside my gaff. What’s that all about, eh? It’s outrageous. Having to smell them, I mean. Don’t they know they’ll drive the house prices down? Get a job. Not that difficult is it? I’m working class and I managed it.
Blimey.
Then you’ve got your PC Gestapo telling us what to do. I’ll tell them where to go. How about that? SJWs. Social Justice Warriors. Stupid Jobless W*****s, I call ‘em. University types. Well, I went to the University of Life and I got a PhD in Pulling Myself Together and Getting the F*** On With It.
That university we got here. Crawling with commies, it is. Like cockroaches, they are. Remember history anyone? The Russian Revolution started with subversive talk of ‘knowledge exchange strategies’. Lenin taught business studies. Stalin was a professor of leisure and tourism. Lest we forget. Never forget.
And more to the point, what’s the point? Nine grand a year to learn some fancy words with which to bash our Queen and Country. It’s a swindle. I tell you.
And where does it get you in the Real World, eh? If I was dictator – which I bloody should be – I’d bring back conscription. That’d sort them students out. Instead of crawling out of the ivory tower and into the dole queue they’d go and get themselves blown up instead. Young people need that kind of discipline. And if that didn’t work I’d bring back hanging. Never did me any harm. Quite enjoyed it. Actually.
Makes you sick doesn’t it? And that’s the truth.
Never mind climate change. (Another lefty swindle). Never mind Kim Jong what’s-his-face. Never mind war, famine, AIDS or Jeremy Corbyn. The biggest threat to our civilisation is political correctness. Gone mad. Utterly bonkers.
I mean, whatever next? Batperson versus Superpansexual? The fur-hatted boys of the PC NKVD raiding my house at dawn and confiscating all my Jim Davidson and Richard B Spencer DVDs? Like to see ‘em try, mush.
You know who I’m talking about. It’s that lot who’ve infiltrated all our great local institutions from Her Majesty’s Armed Forces to Purbrook Crochet Club. Like rats, they are. That lot with their knock-kneed, limp-wristed hankering not to be beaten to death. For what’s basically a lifestyle choice. Sad. Pathetic. Get a life. Not a lifestyle.
Clean your bedroom. Keep your back straight. Are you a man or a mouse? Are you a bird or a bloke? Make your mind up.
You couldn’t make it up.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against it. Don’t think people should go to prison for it anymore. But just don’t come bothering me with it. Don’t follow me into a public toilet, grab me by the shirt-tail, whisper sweet nothings into my earhole and then start singing Village People songs at me. Or you’ll get a knuckle sarnie. With a side order of acute pain. With sod-right-off sauce squirted all over it.
It’s how Nazi Germany started. I tell you. And Stalinist Russia. And contemporary Southampton. These snowflakes don’t understand our way of life. Our freedoms. Our free minds. Our free markets.
If you don’t like our austerity, exploitation, Islamophobia, gender pay gaps, neo-imperialist warfare, environmental destruction or our Katie Hopkins then bugger off to Mars with you. That’s a red planet, isn’t it?
Traitors. Cowards. Ingrates.
It’s what we’re all thinking but who has the balls to say it?
Donald Trump has the balls. Nice ones, I hear. What a geezer. We need someone like him in our city. Donna Jones is alright but she doesn’t go far enough. How far is far enough? Don’t know. But Trump would go further.
And that’s what we need right now. Otherwise we’ll continue to live in some anti-free-speech-liberal-moron’s wet dream of 1984. The book, not the year. Obviously.
Sometimes I feel like I’m the only sane one left. Everyone else is on a weekend break to Cloud Cuckoo Land. Except they can’t ever come back because the airline’s gone into liquidation. And Heathrow Airport’s closed down. Because of the bloody unions.
Probably.
I could go on speaking my bonce like this. But is anyone still reading? Did anyone start reading? Maybe all they did was frown at the clickbaity title for a second.
It’s OK. I’m used to that.
Photography by Moshe Tasky.
