Chris Page's Blog, page 2

From Reagan to Trump 2.0: Billionaires astride the smoking remains of reality is a boringly predictable outcome

It’s 2025, and the United States — or what’s left of it — has entered its latest, gaudiest phase. President Trump (47, if you’re keeping score) sits in the Oval Office once again, this time surrounded by a cabinet of billionaires so ostentatious it makes Louis XIV look like an hole-dwelling ascetic. Elon Musk, having donated a small nation’s GDP to Trump’s campaign, stood on stage with the president-elect, flashing his best visionary disruptor grin and Nazi salutes. Mark Zuckerberg nodded approvingly from the audience, perhaps dreaming up a new algorithm to optimise democracy out of existence. Jeff Bezos arrived in the claws of one of his delivery drones. And while democracy flounders, the wealth of these tech titans has soared to unimaginable heights, leaving the rest of us choking on their methane scented tweets.

How did we get here? Was this dystopian reality some cosmic accident, a glitch in the matrix? Hardly. This is the logical endpoint of a capitalist system that was untethered and unleashed more than four decades ago. It all started with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the dynamic duo who convinced us that government was the problem and that the free market — an invisible hand apparently guided by the benevolence of billionaires — would save us.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

The Reagan-Thatcher blueprint

Reagan and Thatcher weren’t just politicians; they were social wrecking balls. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, they ushered in the neoliberal revolution with the zeal of evangelical preachers. Regulation was slashed, public assets were sold off to private bidders, unions were crushed, and taxes on the wealthy were shaved down to the barest nub. It was all wrapped in the glittering promise of trickle-down economics, the idea that if you make the rich richer, they’ll eventually share the spoils with the rest of us. Forty years later, we’re still waiting for that trickle.

What they really did was build a system where wealth and power could accumulate unchecked. They didn’t just plant the seeds of inequality; they fertilised them with corporate greed and watered them with public bewilderment. And now, we’re living in the jungle that grew.

Enter the tech kings

Fast forward to today, and the billionaires are no longer just donors or lobbyists; they’re running the show. Elon Musk is the most obvious example, a man who somehow convinced the public he’s Tony Stark when he’s really just a wannabe Bond villain.

Quick quiz. Q: Why are Tesla trucks bulletproof? A: Duh!

Musk’s open support for Trump’s campaign, not to mention his staggering financial contributions, makes it clear where his interests lie: maintaining a system where billionaires rule, and the rest of us marvel at their rockets.

And he’s not alone. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and other tech oligarchs have all, to varying degrees, supported or validated Trump’s return to power. Sure, they’ll throw the occasional philanthropic bone our way — a hospital here, a climate pledge there — but don’t mistake that for altruism. These gestures are PR stunts, distractions from the fact that their wealth and influence have ballooned while the rest of us are left to fight over the crumbs.

The tech bros didn’t emerge in a vacuum. They’re the heirs to the neoliberal legacy, embodying its core principle: that private wealth is inherently superior to public good. They’ve repackaged this ideology for the digital age, cloaking their self-interest in the language of disruption and innovation. But make no mistake: they’re not outsiders challenging the system. They *are* the system.

The cost of the billionaire era

What’s the price of this billionaire takeover? For starters, democracy itself. Trump’s second term has already been marked by policies that blatantly enrich his cabinet of billionaires, from tax breaks for corporations to government contracts handed out like party favours. Meanwhile, public institutions — already weakened by decades of underfunding — are crumbling. Schools, hospitals, infrastructure: all sacrificed at the altar of private profit.

Inequality, of course, continues to spiral out of control. The wealth gap between billionaires and the average citizen has reached obscene levels. It’s no longer just a gap; it’s a chasm, and at the bottom lies a sea of disillusionment, rage, and despair.

Trickle down was always gush-up. As money piles up in Elysium so does power. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Who knew?

With the brake cables cut and all checks and balances broken, there was only one possible outcome.

The Trump cabinet is reported to have a combined wealth of $340 billion.

But hey, at least we can watch billionaires play at Space Race on Twitter, right?

The slightly gilded dystopia

This is the world Reagan and Thatcher built, albeit with shinier gadgets and more charismatic villains. The billionaire class has replaced traditional governance, turning politics into a puppet show where they pull the strings. And let’s not kid ourselves: they’re not doing it for us. They’re doing it for themselves, for their wealth, for their power, for their legacy.

So where does that leave the rest of us? Trapped in a gilded dystopia where democracy is little more than a marketing slogan, where the rich rule with impunity, and where the dream of a fairer society feels more distant than ever. Perhaps we’ll eventually wake up and demand a system that values people over profit. Or perhaps we’ll just keep scrolling, liking, and retweeting while the oligarchs build their empires.

After all, who needs democracy when you’ve got a self-driving car and the promise of a one-way ticket to Mars?

We need to talk about Adrian Chiles. But do we really have to?

We need to talk about that Adrian Chiles.

Do we have to? I don’t want to. 

I don’t want to either, so let’s make it quick.

Thing is, Adrian has had his fingers in the ink again. Adrian keeps getting his fingers in the ink. 

He has a regular column in The Guardian, a publication that is a bastion of fine journalism, pioneering, even. In its early days, The Guardian brought news of the Peterloo massacre to London and the rest of the country within hours of it happening. Since then, they have helped publish Chelsea Manning’s and Edward Snowden’s data dumps from the US government. They blew the lid on corporations and the mega rich hiding their wealth offshore through the Panama Papers. They exposed Cambridge Analytica’s attempts to subvert democracy by manipulating voters through online manipulation blah. Their routine journalism confronts corporate and political conniving and lawbreaking, injustice and inequality, the climate crisis. They publish George Monbiot. They were even shot dead in the Jason Bourne movie (which one was it?) which shows real commitment to investigative journalism. 

And they publish Adrian Chiles. 

Chiles’ recent fearless forays into this turbulent world, which is awash in urgent narratives, have given us essays about ham sandwiches, leaving his wallet in the fridge, the smell of his dad’s car, his own inclination to vomit in moving vehicles, the disastrous slippiness of glasses on noses, and the entirely original and insightful observation that over time, the world fills with fangled things and phrases. 

The world is boiling in its own fluids, Trump and Musk are dismantling both civilisation and reason, the jackbooted right are marching past your front door, we teeter on the brink of nuclear war but Chiles brings us impolite people shouting at him in passing from a car.

The cost of living crisis is bankrupting businesses, forcing people to choose between heating and food and to find strategies for boiling water without turning on the kettle while energy companies reap obscene profits, but Chiles swoops on our consciousness urging us to use mushrooms instead of bread when making sandwiches — sandwiches being a major theme of his writing, it would seem. 

Of course, we do not all want to face the imminent collapse of all we hold dear all the time and a little diversion into the shared experience of the everyday, leavened with a good splurg of humour is welcome. But you won’t find it in Chiles’ stuff which has all the wit and appeal of a dull old fuck listing the inconsequentialities of his day to a decorticated spouse while she unpacks the bags of Lidl groceries, putting the canned and imperishables in the freezer and the perishables in the airing cupboard. 

Interesting, Adrian is not. 

No stubbed toe is too profound for Mr Chiles.

We are not, in case you are not catching my drift, talking about a new Orwell with a twenty-first century ‘As I Please’. 

Then there’s the interminable whinging about his own drinking. Oh my gosh, I drink too much! I am self-indulgent to a self-pitying degree. If Chiles were an actual alcoholic with an actual drink problem, then he would be welcome to our sympathy and even our reading time. But he’s not. He’s a fucking whinger who sees his unremarkable appetite for booze as something, well, remarkable, as something worth writing a column about. 

Imagine being cornered in an old folks home by an old lady who talked incessantly about her degenerate tendency to eat more chocolate digestives with her tea than she considers reasonable. That’s Chiles going on about booze. 

I believe he even wrote a book about it called something like The Hell of Regularly Having Four Pints When I Thought that Three was Adequate and Indeed the Maximum Daily Intake of Alcohol as Defined by HMG, CDC, WHO and the Biscuit-Eating Lady in the Old Folks Home.

He must be a lot of fun in a pub, that bloke. 

So why does the Graun give him so many column inches?

Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that his wife NAME happens to be [managing check] editor of the same The Guardian that hosts his columns. 

Having said that, a couple has to make a living. Times are hard and all that. Last year, Viner received a 150000 (42 per cent) pay rise. In 2014 Chiles himself was the highest paid whatever on TV, his earnings for the year topping four million quid. I suppose it’s possible he has blown on all that money on chocolate digestive or stubbed toe therapy, but has hasn’t bothered us with a column about it, so I suspect not. 

Of course, you have, dear reader, the option of not reading Chiles. We have the option of ignoring all fuck out of him.

Yet. He exists. 

Every day the Graun asks me for money, tiresomely totalling the number of articles I have read since whenever, and when that money-begging pop-up appears it is often right next to Chiles gurning face. I cannot separate the two images, I cannot undo that juxtaposition. I cannot pay to see that smug pudgy fizzog. 

Chiles is also taking up space that could be used by someone else. Someone who needs the money. Someone who is just starting out. Someone who has something to say and a style to say it in. 

Orange is the new fascist black

Apparently, some people are boycotting Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads this week for reasons of Suckerberg zucking up to the Big Orange One. Some people are just leaving those platforms completely. 

Look at that: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. That represents a considerable reach for one person (the first human recipient of a rat penis transplant, according to post factcheck FB, not that that’s relevant). Reach: add to the Zucker-reach that of their spiritual daddy, the Musk-rat. 

(Hey, was it a Musk-rat penis transplant that Fuckerberg received?)

And then consider that Bezos, another orange acolyte, owns the Washington Post where employees are protesting and in some cases leaving because of his interference. 

Lurking at the Trump ascension like a rotting corpse at a children’s tea party there was Rupert Murdoch. No explanation needed for the presence of this billionaire purveyor of porky pies of a very particular political flavour. 

Consider further that the owners of almost every media outlet in the ‘free’ west is owned by billionaires who are aligned with the malign listed above and consider how fucked the information space is. 

And now Musk-Trump is going after TikTok. No way can they let a Chinese outfit continue to suck up the data and induce encephalopathy in its American users to their own political ends when Musk-Trump could be sucking up the data and inducing encephalopathy in its American users to their own political ends. And cementing another blockstone in the edifice of their media monopoly. 

Not that there’s much information in the information space. Which is, of course, the point of owning it. I’ve given up X-Twitter but kept one anonymous account which I use to peek in from time to time. I know I shouldn’t. It’s like knowing you shouldn’t look into the malfunctioning loos at a British railway station because you know you’ll be revolted and then disappointed in yourself for caving in to the desire to look even when you know what’s going to happen but then doing it anyway. Well that’s X-Twitter and me now. And there’s a reason for mentioning this other than squeezing poo into the story. Twitter is a scary place now. Musk has fixed the algorithm to emphasise his tweets so when you log on, the feed is basically Musk’s deranged announcements. The place is a permanent Nuremberg rally. The federal government is the source of all inflation, goes one tweet. Fact! it concludes. I don’t suppose the goggle-eyed Muskovites even want to know that it isn’t. The ‘free’ market is the source of all inflation. Yar boo sucks! Who cares when we can see Musk throwing Nazi salutes at a presidential inauguration? Who cares when Musk bounces up and down you see his belly and marvel that he truly has no navel because he’s actually a reptile? 

Social media, specifially X, Musk repeatedly tells us on X, is the new journalism. Legacy journalism has disgraced itself by demanding verification, facts, rigour and other difficult words. Your own opinion, your feeling, your urge, your brain fart is the New Journalism. That’s all that matters now, what you *think*, what your Taco Bell stuffed gut tells you, which is basically what Musk-Tump just said on the same platform. 

Cats help us all!

There’s a chest-crushingly heavy irony in Musk’s pronouncements since most legacy media has already given up on those qualities that used to make journalism journalism. Musk-Trump’s complaints are presumably aimed at any outlet that doesn’t actually toe the party line, like the Des Moines Register, which dared suggest Trump was not omnipotent by publishing a pre-election poll that dared suggest that Trump was not winning, and which is now being sued by the same Trump. 

Meanwhile, Musk-Trump is/are swivelling their swivel eyes towards The Rest of the World, and of most relevance to me, Europe, which they are attempting to turn into a basted turkey in the image of their own US supporters. 

So that’s happening. 

Of course, we’ll each of us decide how to respond to the current situation but continuing to come out to play with the oligarchs doesn’t strike me as sustainable. 

Oh, please excuse me while I once again throw out some chaff to get past Facebook’s algorithms: cats, more cats, an excess of cats; chocolate; chocolate cats; cute inconsequential things galore with bows and bells on. Minions, Oompa Loompas, Munchkins, goggled-eyed thralls. Is that enough chaff?

Election: delayed reaction

A night in the Norfolk Inn, Paddington. With added bed bugs

There was a bed bug; an actual bed bug on my actual body. In a hotel. In actual London. 

This attractive photo of the Norfolk Inn from the Agoda.com website is, like so many other photos on the site, not actually the Norfolk Inn.

I know there is some reservation in the world about naming and shaming. There’s something vaguely indecent about it. Someone rips you off, fucks you over, or rents you a room for actual money that has actual bed bugs in it, but for some reason, it’s the adult thing to keep a stoic silence. Is it churlish or weak to complain? Is it unfair to point out unfairness? Answers on a postcard, please. 

Meanwhile.

I’m naming and shaming. This bed bug experience cost me £90, a night’s sleep and a lot of stress.

So here it is: the Norfolk Inn, Norfolk Square, Paddington, London. The most awful place I’ve ever stayed, and would have been even without the bed bugs. 

Someone else’s Q-tip, left thoughtfully in the broken sticks of furniture in the bed bug room.

I stayed there one miserable night in early August, 2024. I’d flown halfway around the world from Japan, an 18-hour flight. I was exhausted. But I was back in my city, looking forward to putting my feet up and decompressing with a bottle of wine, and hitting a local cafe for a proper full English the next morning. 

I lugged my suitcases from Heathrow on the train to Paddington.

Alarm bells: the front door of the Norfolk Inn seemed to have broken locks and seemed permanently open which does not ding well for security. There was no one on the 24-hour front desk. 

When eventually an indifferent member of staff appeared, I was given a room in the basement.

The basement was accessed through a spring-loaded fire door and a narrow flight of stairs, to be negotiated with big bags. 

The rubbish in the hall outside the second room they offered me.

The basement stank and there was a crushed cockroach on the carpet outside my room. 

The key card I was given didn’t open the door. I went back up and the staff guy gave me a master key, one that would presumably open any door in the hotel. Incidentally, reading the online reviews of the Norfolk Inn, it would seem that this is not the first time the staff have given a guest a master key. 

Once in the room, the door wouldn’t lock. I wedged my big suitcase against it to keep it secure. 

The room stank. The bathroom stank. Everything was filthy. Half the curtain hooks were broken and the rag of a curtain dangled from the rail and failed to cover the window. The furniture was apparently stolen from a skip such was its disrepair. 

The place was squalid. 

I sat on the bed to have some reviving wine and plan my next move. 

And there it was. the fucking bed bug. Dark, appleseed shaped, walking on my leg. 

The murdered curtains in the second room were in better condition than those in the bed bug room.

And so there’s clarity: yes, I know what a fucking bed bug looks like. The infestations in France and Korea have been in the news this year. And here was one in London. 

If it had not been past midnight, had I not been fatigued by the flight, I would have left and found another place. 

I complained loudly and swearily to the staff man who reacted as if I was being unreasonable. 

A bed bug? It was only a bed bug. What’s the problem?

He showed me to another room on the second floor. It was marginally less squalid than the basement, there were no evident cockroaches, and ripping the bed covers off revealed no bed bugs. 

I reluctantly agreed to stay in that room. 

The unplugged, unmounted, unpluggable air conditioner.

Once again, the curtains seem to have been murdered and barely covered the window. The furniture blocked the door to the toilet/bathroom and had to be rearranged to allow the door to open. The bathroom stank, there was mould in the shower, which looked too contaminated to use, the floor was almost as dirty as the basement room. The place was murderously hot, but there was an air conditioner balanced on top of the radiator — but it wasn’t plugged in and, on examination, there was of course, no socket to plug it into.

Outside the room there was a pile of trash in the hall which included vile rags covered in some kind of oily substance which may or may not have been actual body fluids. 

I rolled the bed covers back but sleep was near impossible but vigilance for crawling biting things mostly forbade sleep. 

I booked the room through Agoda.com who have been startlingly indifferent to my complaints. I suspect they may have taken down the review I submitted to their site of the Norfolk Inn and its bed bugs because I can’t find it. 

Many of the attractive photos on the Agoda.com listing for the Norfolk Inn are not of the Norfolk Inn at all.

Indeed, rather than act on the feedback I gave them in both the review and an email of complaint the site has been regularly sending me email encouraging me to book a room at the very hotel I complained about and which has bed bugs. So big name and shame to Agoda.com too. 

The reviews of the Norfolk Inn include similar tales. Bed bugs, cockroaches, mice, filth, indifference. Read the reviews on Tripadvisor and Google. When booking hotels, read the reviews. I didn’t. My fault.

The Agoda.com listing for the Norfolk Inn contains some nice photos of a hotel anyone would be happy to stay at. The interior photos, the photos of the rooms are not the Norfolk Inn. They are a deception. 

An illustrative photo of a bed bug. Not the actual bed bug I found on my body in the Norfolk Inn, Paddington, London.

Agoda.com joins Booking.com and GoToGate.com as big online booking agents that are happy to take your money and then abandon you to your fate and stuff their fingers in their ears when you try to tell them about the shit they served up to you. GoToGate.com defrauded my son and his partner out of hundreds of dollars mis-selling a product and then ignoring our complaints. 

Please don’t use these companies. You are exposing yourself to all sorts of financial risk. Book direct from hotels or airlines if you can, even if it costs a little more.

Which brings us back to the Norfolk Inn, Paddington, London. Did I tell you about the bed bugs?

Why I’m v(b)o(a)ting G r e e n

Hello Kitty, cappuccino, walk in the park. 

I understand that Facebook has tweaked its algorithms to suppress p o l iti c a l content but I have something to say about the UK’s g e n e r a l e l e c t i o n, 2024. I am therefore inserting lots of algorithm-friendly words in this post

— cats, pooches, satin hats —

and mangling the proscribed words such as v o t ing, to fool those Zucker-bots into allowing these thoughts. 

The v-word will be rendered as ‘boat’ because when I was a wee kid and my primary school was closed for a day to become a p011ing station, I misunderstood the term ‘v o ti ng day’ as ‘boating day’. I had this image of masses of adults spending the day paddling aimlessly in row boats on the pond in the park to crucial but inscrutable ends. Just one of those eccentric things adults did. I was perhaps right for the wrong reasons.

Toast. With fig jam. Yum. 

I don’t need to explain why I will not be boating for the C o ns e r  va tiv es. They will, of course, be missed. Like the pomegranate-faced gentleman at community events who arrives pissed, stuffs the pockets of this tweeds with cakes from the buffet, and starts touching the children. 

Christmas!

I will not be boating for The Other Lot. I am thoroughly done with The Other Lot. I have given The Other Lot more chances than I have given something that I have given an irrational number of chances. 

A selection of fine cheeses. Bouncing puppies. 

Call me old fashioned, but I would like The Other Lot to behave like An Other Lot. After fourteen years of plunder and rapacity and incompetence (or 45 years if you start the clock with the Wicked Witch in 1979 and TB as her happy munchkin), I would like The Other Lot to have an actual vision. I would like The Other Lot to stand for something. I would like The Other Lot to have a clue. 

Instead of vision we get invisibility; you look directly at Star m er’s Other Lot and you can see right through them to Tor y H Q. 

Tinsel. The sky at night. Ice cream.

So frightened of being seen as an alternative to the T o r ies, The Other Lot have abandoned any policies or thoughts that might distinguish them. Their main campaigning thrust at the moment seems to be that none of them actually placed a dodgy bet on the date of the election. 

And then there’s the ‘pledge card’. What is it with that ‘pledge card’ with its list of ‘first steps’? First steps are for toddlers; ‘pledge cards’ are for fusty, earnestly dimwitted headteachers of primary schools. Are you convinced by this funky, first-steppin’ pledge card?  Whoa! The man has a plan! It’s pledged on a wedge of cardboard! This guy must be serious! Don’t mess with this card man or he’ll send his bovver boys round to your place to READ IT TO YOU!

Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Church bells.

Oh, yes. And Gaz a. Sir Keef Starbucks has endorsed the ongoing genocide. No one that validates k i l l ing kids gets my X.

Sausages! Bananas! Extravagant cakes at every road junction!

This is an extraordinary moment in history. Unfettered cap i tali sm is laying waste to the planet and people’s lives. Flag waving, knuckle dragging, anus breathing morons are on the march. The orange blob is heading back to the White House, wiping his feet on the inert body of the current incumbent. And we get the little rich kid on one hand, and the pledge-card carrying nonentity on the other. 

Cappuccino, fried chicken, spectacular sunset.

The Greens are the only party that’s alert to the moment. Proper policies for the climate. Restoration of the NHS. Separation of state and Big Money … No tolerance for mass murder … don’t take my word for it. See for yourself:

https://greenparty.org.uk/about/our-manifesto/

According to the pundits The Other Lot are headed for a supermajority. It’ll be a supermajority minus one, minus the only one that really counts, minus the one that makes all the difference. But I’m confident that Sir Keith Starburst will read this note and, chastened, will rush to my door to find out what he really needs to do. 

Bunny rabbits, Taylor Swift,  nice cup of tea.

If it isn’t screamingly obvious, this rant was first posted on Facebook.

Sales pitch

Dear Mr salesman man (because you’re always a man), this is what I want to say to you: fuck off.

You come up to me in my own driveway as I’m unloading a fresh batch of martinis from the car and you try to sell me new walls, paint, clean drains, pipes to put on the roof, insurance, religion, and body parts. And when you try to sell me newspapers you talk like you think I’ve never heard of them or the news or world events or the world. You are a patronising, small-brained prick. Yes, I know what’s going on in the world but clearly you don’t or you wouldn’t be trying to sell me this propaganda rag.

And you don’t take no for an answer. You know that? You don’t fucking respect the word no. It’s not a difficult idea: whatever you’re selling I don’t fucking want it. How tough is that? So when I say no, you just keep going like an apprentice rapist, so I have to keep saying no no no no no no no until it hurts.

Oh, I’m very polite about it. I just go ii desu, ii desu, ii desu, which, you know, is a nice way of saying no thanks, it’s a nice way of saying no fucking way, just fuck the fuck off out of my fucking face, out of my life, out of my fucking wallet, but you don’t take the hint, do you.

You just stand there all sweat and bad teeth and gibber-jabber bollocks and you won’t go away, and then there’s another one of you there thrusting at me with another crap thing I don’t want, and another you and another you and you don’t fucking go away.

No. Absolutely fucking not. No way.

You are no fucking use to humanity. None whatsoever. You produce nothing. You contribute nothing. You create no meaning, no insight, no value; you hang there in no useful space, a leech on the back of the producers and doers. Take yourself away back to that Golgafrincham ship of fools so we can shoot you into deep space to contaminate some dark matter somewhere. (Apologies to dark matter.)

No, and no again. I am an adult. I can make up my mind for myself. I, and only I, will decide what I need and when I need it. My needs are no business of yours. You don’t even know me. How can you possibly know what I need or want? 

Just for the record here’s a sample of my needs and wants: love, my family, a hug from my cat; a very few good friends to whom I don’t need to explain myself; some time with my stories and drawings; a good book to read, some music to listen to, a picture to be inspired by; the occasional view of mountains or the milky way; a glimpse of wild animals living life their way without humans or salesmen. How come you never sell me those things? You’re all dishrags and rag ties and great deals that will make life complete but which won’t, and some kind of non-specific brain disease.

No, let me amplify on that secret: I know what I want and when I don’t have it I have the initiative to go out and get it. 

And the other secret, if you haven’t guessed it by now: I smile at you, I’m reasonable, and I pretend to be patient, but behind that careful declining what really is going through my head is fuck the fuckety-fuck off you slimy piece of crap.

OK? 

So you’re still there. 

What part of fuck off don’t you fucking understand?

White Rabbit Noir

A short story by Chris Page

1

The table in the police interrogation room was rough wood. The chair was brusque alloy, the floor was obstreperous linoleum and the tiles on the walls were downright offensive. They were grouted, if Lester was not wrong, with blood.

‘So, tell me about the rabbit,’ said Inspector Yard. The rabbit was dead. The cops figured Lester killed him.

‘I told you about the rabbit.’

‘So tell me about the rabbit again.’

‘What do you want me to tell you?’

‘I want you to tell the truth, Lester. I want you to tell me you killed the rabbit.’

‘I didn’t kill the rabbit.’

‘So why didn’t you kill the rabbit? You had plenty of reason to kill the rabbit.’

‘So I didn’t kill the rabbit,’ said Lester. ‘Lock me up for it.’

‘We did, in case you didn’t notice.’

Lester lived on the naff side of town, a neighbourhood so run down it was shunned by both dead rats and contagion. His flat was a damning box at the top of some winding, unreliable stairs. The rest of the building, if it existed at all, was made of damp, darkness, despair, and a very sad floral print wallpaper. When Lester got home last night, the rabbit was already in his flat, hogging the whole sofa.

There was white hair all over the place — he was moulting. As ever, the big white one was dressed rabbit standard: waistcoat and fob. He was chomping on a carrot.

Lester didn’t know how the rabbit got in. Burrow? Mirror? The rabbit had his ways. You didn’t ask.

‘Say, what’s up?’ the rabbit said. Lester hated it when he did that.

‘Hello, rabbit,’ said Lester in his best defeated voice.

‘What did the rabbit say?’ asked Yard.

‘He said he was late.’

‘He said he was late? For a very important date?’

‘Hey, I’m not being facetious here.’

‘Hey, I am being facetious here,’ barked Yard, right in Lester’s face and jabbing the dismayed table with a large sausage finger.

‘I’m late,’ said the rabbit. ‘And you’re holding me up.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Lester.

‘I’m late for a very important date.’

Yard barked again: ‘So he did say that!’ 

‘Yeah, but I think he was being facetious.’

‘What date is that?’ Lester asked the rabbit.

‘March 6, 2010.’

‘You are very late indeed. I don’t think you’re going to make it. You’re going to have to hare about.’

‘That would be mad. Anyways, I’m adding it to your bill.’

‘Oh.’

‘You owe us big time.’

‘How do you figure that?’

The rabbit fixed his coal-red eyes — part glowing incredulity, part fuming exasperation — on Lester, as if the man had asked the most stupid question in the history of stupid questions. 

‘I don’t have any big time to give you.’

‘Get some. You have 48 hours. And then we’re coming to find you. Ready or not.’

And that was that. Except that later that night the rabbit was found dead. Rabbit soup: boiled alive in his own Jacuzzi.

‘How can that happen?’ Lester asked Yard.

‘That’s what you are going to tell us,’ said the policeman.

‘Well, I don’t know anything.’

‘Do you have an alibi?’

‘You know I do.’

 ‘We didn’t see it in your place when we picked you up.’

‘No. Well, I guess it slipped out when the rabbit left. I figured it would come back when it got hungry, but now I’m here. It must be starving, probably thinks it’s been abandoned.’

‘Diddums.’

Yard thoughtfully sucked his thumb while the brutal reality of his callousness sank in to Lester.

‘Oi, that’s my thumb.’ 

‘Crap. I thought it tasted funny.’ Yard relinquished Lester’s thumb. ‘Look. I’m going to have to let you go. For the time being. But don’t get any funny ideas.’

‘I don’t have funny ideas. I only have boring ones.’

‘I’m not doing this out of some sweet act of charity. I’m not going all gooey on you. It’s just, er, procedure. The chef, he says —‘

‘Chief.’

‘The chief, he says we have to procedurally let you out for a while. And don’t get thinking this is some kind of ploy where we let you go and then secretly follow you to get evidence. And we ain’t letting you go on the off chance that you’re not the killer and having you on the loose will lure out the real villain.’

‘So why are you really letting me out?’

‘Personally, I’m hoping a piano will fall on your head, saving me the trouble of cleaning up all this rabbit poo.’

Lester was let go from the police station. No one said goodbye or wished him well.

It was a hot, bright morning. Breathing was like receiving mouth to mouth from a gin drunk. Troubles were piling up in Lester’s life like smelly black bags in a bin strike but the oblivious city got on noisily around him with its own thing.

The rabbit was out of the picture but his associates most assuredly were not. Hell, they might even think Lester had topped the bunny to get out of his obligation. Never mind that only a stupendously stupid person would get out of dire straights by murdering his way into extremely dire straights. Like Yard, the rabbit’s associates were only as bright as the rocks they lived under and that is exactly the way they thought. If they weren’t out to get Lester for what he didn’t do to the rabbit, they would be into him for what he didn’t owe, and thanks to Inspector Yard’s interest in him, he was now 12 hours closer to the deadline without being one iota nearer having what they wanted. 

On top of that, the inspector’s rationale for letting him out was hokey baloney. The police had to be watching him. 

On an impulse, Lester stopped and turned around. Sure enough, only twenty metres down the street a dog with an earnestly innocent expression on its face stopped and raised its leg on a supine lush. The dog was clearly flat-footed. Giveaway.

No ploy, schmoy. Yard was full of stuff.

It wasn’t like Lester didn’t have other things to think about. There was his mother. There was the end of the world as we know it. There was the epidemic.

To top it all, there was the kitchen sink. The drainpipe was blocked, as in totally. He had a bucket under the U-bend to catch the drips and a month of newspapers to soak up any accidents, but it was, like, how long ago that he had put them there? The thing was ready to go critical. Day and night it hummed and thrummed. Sometimes it drummed. It was as taught as well cooked spaghetti dangling an anvil twenty storeys directly above Lester’s head. You could feel the vibrations down the block. One day soon, the thing was going to go off and wash away the grime holding the building together. His landlord, Mr. Belsen, would have him unceremoniously kicked into the next world and probably sue his grandmother for damages. That was sue his own grandmother for damages and then Lester’s too for good measure.

Angry, Lester wheeled around a corner off the main drag and headfirst into the path of a falling piano.

2

‘Tell me about the piano.’

The hospital was made of the bits that had lost the punch up to be included in the police station. The bed was designed for an Indian mystic to use in displays of superhuman fortitude. The walls slouched in resignation and the cracked tiles were grouted, unlike the police station, with fresh blood.

‘He may still be unconscious,’ said a new voice that wasn’t Inspector Yard.

‘It doesn’t make any difference with this one,’ said Yard. ‘Tell me about the piano, Lester. We know you did it. Material evidence: one shattered Schwinn —’

‘Steinway.’

‘Steinbeck. Same thing. Witnesses: several traumatised cockroaches and alley rats, not to mention a urinating flat-footed dog now in need of dry cleaning. Forensics: piano-shaped indentations all over your head. Beat that rap, Liberace.’

‘Liberace was a pianist, not a rapper,’ said the other voice. It sounded like it belonged to someone who was genetically at least 50 per cent wheedle.

Lester kept his eyes tight closed. He didn’t know what was worse, the pain of his injuries, the anxiety of his potentially terminal life predicament or the conversation he was forced to endure.

‘I think you’re faking it, Lester,’ said Yard.

‘He faked the piano falling on his head? That makes sense,’ said the other voice.

‘I dunno. The injuries seem real enough to me,’ said another voice.

And wasn’t this Lester’s life all over?

‘And ain’t this your life all over, Lester,’ said Yard, as if reading Lester’s mind again.

‘Loser,’ he added a nanosecond before the word appeared in Lester’s mind.

‘Right. I gotta go, said Yard. I’m bored. I don’t have a head for music unlike our friend here. I’ll just leave the paperwork for him to read at his leisure. Arrest warrants: wilful destruction of one flying piano, vandalism, bleeding on the pavement, grand theft piano, obstructing police enquiries by being unconscious, being a loser. Subpoena: to appear before the City Philharmonic to hear Chopin, or whatever. Affidavits from everyone on the planet in support of the above.’

‘I’ll leave the bill for the piano with him, too.’

‘I’ll leave the bill for his medical care.’

‘Aren’t you the taxi driver?’

‘Sure I’m the taxi driver. I only moonlight here at the hospital as a doctor to make up the tips. Though I find patients are pretty bad tippers. Especially when they die.’

‘Ungrateful bastards. Crims are bad tippers too unless you hang them out of a window and shake them.’

The sink! thought Lester and sort of jumped in the bed as if he had been electrocuted. He had to get back and sort that sink out or … or something, that’s what.

Another voice, a voice like silk and milk and honey and manna right from the promised land, a voice that was love itself.

‘You know you promised me the world? You know you promised me diamonds? How about just a diamond world? Just you, me and a diamond world forever, Doopy-Doos. How about that?’

It was Patsy.

At last, Lester opened his eyes. ‘Hey there, Patsy. You look beautiful. You look just like a radio star.’

‘I’ve had radiotherapy.’

‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘I didn’t come in. I was hiding behind the de-ventilator machine waiting for those gorillas to go.’

‘What gorillas?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t see them now.’

‘Have you stopped taking the medication? You know you shouldn’t stop taking the medication.’

‘Yes, please.’

Patsy. Patsy DeKline. Lester’s girl. She may not have been the brightest bulb, nor the sharpest stick, her mind may not have had the straightest aim she may not even have been real, but she was Lester’s girl and she could shoot a mean bow and arrow.

‘I was thinking about the sink. I’ve gotta get outta here.’

‘Well, stop thinking about the silly sink. It will explode all on its own without you thinking about it. And you have to learn to spell. As for getting out of here, the door’s over there.’

‘I hadn’t noticed that.’

While Lester struggled into his clothes he filled Patsy in on the contagion, his mother, the impending end of the world as they knew it and the alien invasion. And he brought her up to date on the sink. At the same time, Patsy enumerated all the things she thought Lester was going to give her. It was a long and complicated list because it included most of the known universe and a lot of assumptions about what might be stashed in the unobserved parts of infinity. 

Lester’s street was long and straight and the ruins on it were short and crooked. There was little light, only a ghostly green evanescence from the puddles and the piles of rubbish.

Nothing stirred. Why would it? There was no coffee or tea to be had anywhere, with or without sugar. Patsy and Lester walked in the centre of the street because that was where the mildew was least aggressive. Patsy kept her face to the full, opalescent moon, which she coveted. She often asked Lester how he was going to fetch it down for her.

Patsy abruptly stopped her list-making. A thought seemed to be occuring to her. The effect was eerie. 

‘But what do you want Lester?’ asked Patsy.

‘I want to get one step ahead — just one step further on, would do.’

‘Now you’re just being silly,’ said Patsy. ‘There’s no such thing in the universe.’

It was Lester who heard the lorry first — though he more felt it than heard it, coming up through the cobbles of the street. It was moving very fast and he knew right away that this behemoth was not just taking lettuces to market or undocumented migrants to the cockle beds.

Lester took Patsy by the arm and quickened their pace, which meant Patsy had to speed up her list making. Lester cast around for a place to hide. And then the lights of the lorry were upon them and the ground trembled and the couple ran as fast as Patsy’s list mania would let them.

The lorry was on them. This was it. Lester pulled Patsy right in a feint and then shoved her hard left, hurling himself after her. Their fall was cushioned by the dense shadows beside the road and the lorry hurtled by, kicking up clouds of dust and thwarted hope.

‘Are you OK?’ Lester asked Patsy.

‘Andromeda. Unrequited kisses preserved inside spheres of ancient glass. A nice frothy cappuccino. A truss made from the purest lapis lazuli …’ Patsy replied. She was OK.

Lester took Patsy gently by the waist and steered her back down the street after the vanished lorry but his foot struck something soft and vulnerable. He knew what it was before he picked it up: small, furry, snout and whiskers all grimaced up; back broken, dead but still warm — it was his alibi. Probably killed by the lorry. Perhaps the alibi was coming to greet Lester, hoping for some food, having been locked out for more than 24 hours. Perhaps Lester had inadvertently killed the trusting creature.

It was possible that the alibi had been the lorry’s real target and Lester and Patsy had merely got in its way. 

And the lorry: what was that about? The deadline was still 24 hours away. And how come the lorry was driven by a big, carrot-chomping white rabbit? Lester had distinctly seen it leaning from the cab window, ears flapping in the slipstream as the truck battered past.

He and that alibi went back years. Kept each other out of trouble. Kept each other company. Now he was all alone in the world. ‘Didn’t you once promise me the Crab Nebula? And a lock cut from God’s whiskers.’ Unless you counted Patsy.

Walking to his flat, Lester took stock. He was into the rabbit for what and how much he didn’t know, except the rabbit was stewed and the world thought he did it. Yard was itching to bang him up, and the rabbit’s hench-beasts would be after him either for what he owed or what they thought he did to the big white one, or, more likely, both. The deadline was 24 hours away tops and he’d wasted as much time in the cop shop and the hospital. Now there was the mysterious appearance of another rabbit, armed with a big lorry and out to kill, and the death of his poor, innocent alibi, the only thing between him and the hangman’s gallows. Disease and economic collapse were threatening the survival of the human race and the whole environment had got up and walked out on the planet. The aliens were coming, as was Lester’s mother, and a freak alignment of the planets was threatening to pull the world into little pieces, rendering Earth as an asteroid belt for the moon. On top of all this was Lester’s sink. Better deal with the sink.

3

‘But you’re dead,’ said Lester bleakly.

‘Thanks to you, you murderin’ object of foul invective.’

The rabbit was on Lester’s sofa, just 24 hours after Lester hadn’t hoovered up the last coating of moult. The rabbit was white. That much doesn’t change in death, but now his red eyes were white, his pink ears were white, his waistcoat was white, even the carrot was white.

‘I didn’t do it, Rabbit, I didn’t kill you, I was right here trying to fix the sink when it happened.’

‘Your alibi,’ said the rabbit, ‘doesn’t stand up to examination. Your alibi doesn’t stand up to anything anymore. Your alibi flops lifelessly to all examination or anything else.’

Lester wanted to cry.

‘It is anyway extremely irrelevant whether you cooked me or not. I have decided you did it, and that’s enough. And if I decide someone else was responsible I will kill them as well and maybe someone else after that, depending on how I decide things. I might get the real culprit one day. Really, you don’t want to be innocent anywhere around me.

‘I gave you 48 hours to come up with what you owe me and now I have come to collect.’

‘But it’s been only 24 hours.’

‘So time flies, get used to it. Tempus fugit, Doc.’

‘Memento mori,’ said Patsy as she whipped out her Magnum .38 recoil-full cannon and fired but the rabbit had already hopped out of the way. He hopped again, knocking the gun out of Patsy’s hand with one flying hind leg and batting her to the ground with the other.

Before Lester had even decided he had no idea how to react to this, the bunny was on him. He rabbit punched him to the floor and then drummed on him with his back feet, Thumper style, and then he was at Lester with his nibbly nibbling teeth and when he’d done that he spat Lester’s nose into a corner of the room.

The rabbit wiped blood from his mouth. ‘You have 24 hours to come up with what’s mine, loser man. Yes, I’m giving you an extension, and not to make up for me shortening your profile. I’m doing this because I enjoy your suffering. No other reason. Twenty-four hours.’ And the rabbit departed, walking ethereally through the wall.

‘What does he want,’ asked Patsy, having had some sense momentarily knocked into her.

‘I’m into him big time,’ said Lester through the blood and pain.

‘Big time? Is that what he meant by tempus fugit? And how come you’re into him so big?’

‘Because.’

‘Crikey. That is serious.’ Patsy stared thoughtfully at Lester for a moment. You’ve got no nose, you know,’ she told him.

‘I nose that.’

‘How do you smell?’

‘Terrible.’

‘I have a plan,’ said Patsy with a resolution that alarmed Lester. ‘Come with me.’ She heaved her mutilated man to his feet and out the door. 

‘OK,’ Patsy said. ‘What next?’

‘What next? You mean that was your whole plan, going out the door?’

‘Did you have a better plan?’ 

‘No.’

‘Well, then. Now. If you want to get ahead, get a hat, isn’t that what they say?’

‘Is that what they say?’

‘Yes, that’s what they say.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘People who have hats, silly.’

‘Do you know anyone like that?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I do.’

‘Lester, when we’re all done here, can I have a hat?’

‘If you get a head, sure.’

‘I love you, boopy-bops.’

‘I love you too, Patsy.’

‘I wasn’t talking to you, Lester. I was talking to boopy-bops.’

Boopy-bops was inspector Yard, who was standing behind Lester.

4

‘So, tell me about the rabbit,’ said Inspector Yard. The rabbit was still dead. The cops still figured Lester killed him and they were back in the interrogation room.

‘I told you about the rabbit.’

‘So tell me about the rabbit again.’

‘What do you want me to tell you?’

‘I want you to tell the truth, Lester. I want you to tell me you killed the rabbit.’

‘I didn’t kill the rabbit.’

‘So why didn’t you kill the rabbit? You had plenty of reason to kill the rabbit.’

‘So I didn’t kill the rabbit,’ said Lester. ‘Lock me up for it.’

‘We did, in case you didn’t notice.’

‘Hey, look, the rabbit’s resurrected, OK, so let me go and leave me alone.’

‘Resur, er, rected-schmected. So who did the Lazarus thing on the rabbit? Boiled rabbits don’t just resurrect.’

‘So who bit my nose off?’

‘I dunno. Cut yourself shaving?’

‘C’mon, Patsy, you were there. You tell him.’

Patsy was draped on Yard’s arm. The inspector absent-mindedly handed her the Star of Africa. He then gave her the title deeds to the white dwarf BPM37093, 50 light years from Earth in the constellation of Centaurus, the biggest known diamond in the universe. He draped on her shoulders a coat woven of unicorn hair and proffered a partridge in a pear tree that was potted in the Holy Grail. Patsy sighed.

‘I didn’t see nothing,’ she said dreamily. ‘Ain’t the rabbit dead, anyways? We had him in a stew with carrots.’

‘May I remind you,’ Lester told Yard with bitterness, ‘that testimony of the figment of a person’s imagination is not admitted in a court of law.’

‘Depends on the particular jurisdiction,’ said Yard in his best legal voice, ‘and the relative reality thereof.’

‘I want to see my lawyer.’

Yard pulled from an inside pocket a crumpled photo of an untended grave on a barren plain.

‘Yup, that’s him.’

‘Anything else you want to see? I can’t show you the future because you don’t have one.’

The police cell began to tremble. The city block on which the police station stood shook. The whole city rocked. A low, scary rumble took the air and the ground both.

‘The sink has gone off,’ said Lester dejectedly.

‘I’ll add it to the charge sheet,’ said Yard. ‘Negligent destruction of a continental landmass. How do you plead?’

‘On my knees.’

‘Do you have an alibi?’ Yard asked.

‘You know I … don’t.’

‘You’re toast. Burned toast that’s gone soggy in the rain. Adios, toast man.’

Yard and Patsy and Lester could feel and hear the shockwave and tsunami of refuse from his exploded sink tearing the city apart as it hurtled towards them.

‘Anyone want a lift outta here?’ Yard asked. ‘Well when I say I anyone, I don’t mean just anyone, I mean anyone who’s anyone. C’mon, Patsy.’

Page raises prices of own ebooks because they’re fucking worth it

I have put up the prices of the ebook versions of my stories. 

I’ve not just put up the prices, I’ve tied rocket packs to them and shot them through the roof. In a time of rampant inflation, in the middle of an actual cost of living crisis, this is of course a sensible thing to do. 

Back in the original day, like any good independent writer/publisher who learned everything he knew about marketing books from Twitter and blog posts and ebooks written by people who knew nothing about marketing books, who were considered authorities simply by dint of writing blog posts and Tweets and ebooks about marketing that they made up and no other reason, I set my prices extremely low — as low as they could go, as low as KDP’s pricing system would allow and I even gave books away, and like all other independent writer/publishers, I did this in the hope that this would maximise the volume of units shifted. This would give me lots of exposure, lead inevitably to a snowball effect, and in no time, I would be sitting pretty in my Cotswold mansion, flicking grape seeds and my own snot at the servants. 

Recently, I expanded the distribution of my ebook publications, making them available on Apple Books (and others to be announced). While doing this, I revisited my stories, I revisited the platforms, I saw what was available from established and legacy authors/publishers and how much it cost, and I thought to myself: You know what? Setting the ebook prices as low as possible, it’s like I’m apologising for putting these things out there. Whatever the legacy publishers are charging, I was charging a fraction of that. It’s like I was saying, my books aren’t as good as these other guys so I’m going to charge a pittance. I’m sorry I published them, really I am, but you can have them for next to nothing, just please like my books, PLEASE LIKE THEM!

Bollocks to that. My books are every bit as good as anything out there. Weed is better. I have nothing to apologise for. 

And as for a sales strategy: well you know the low-as-you-can-go strategy works by all the independent authors living lives of luxury on Caribbean islands that they have have bought themselves. 

So I put the prices up. You get what you pay for or, better, you pay for what you get. 

These stories represent hours of hard work. Plotting is difficult. Plotting hurts my head. People who have read my stories have said nice things about them. And being outside the mainstream, they have some credible claim to originality. 

So how do you price these slices of life and time and hard work? How do you put a tag on imagination? Do you price blood, sweat and tears by the litre or the kilogramme or the bucket? How long is a string of goldfish poo?

I have no idea. 

Of course, I don’t have the overheads of a legacy publisher, so I’m not going for their price point. I don’t need to keep myself in country mansions, private jets, glamorous mistresses, cocaine or party poppers. But I do have to feed a cat and escape from the demeaning, soul-destroying drudgery of my appalling day job. 

The price of a pint? How about that? That always seems like a good baseline to me, a yardstick. It strikes me that when paying out for books or CDs or live shows I agonise about whether I can afford the price of what is likely to be a rewarding, lasting experience, yet, when in the pub I’ll be splashing the cash as if money were made of bits of tin and paper. But the price of a pint where? London? Morecombe? Ulan Bator? What if you don’t drink? 

Which brings us the whole bigger issue of artists being paid appropriately for their work. You get what you pay for and you pay for what you get — clearly, in so many areas of life you don’t. However, I want to finish this post so I will leave that thought for another day. 

But dear reader, what do you think? What is a fair price for an ebook? A paperback? Is it the price of a pint? The price of eggs? The price of a Lamborghini? How would you like to see ebooks priced? I’d very much like to see your answers in the comments below or on Mastodon or Twitter. 

Weed, King of the Undies World, The Underpants Tree, Sanctioned, Another Perfect Day in Fucking Paradise, Un-Tall Tales: more expensive than ever. Because they’re fucking worth it. 

On Amazon and Kindle as paperback and ebook. Free ebook with each paperback. On Apple Books as ebooks only. Going up on Google Play and other platforms soon (or eventually).

All Page’s books now available on Apple in new upload frenzy

I have uploaded all my books to Apple Books, begun expanding distribution through other channels, put up all the prices, and tweaked Weed. 

All the books have been available as ebook and paperback through Amazon and Kindle since they were published but I am now expanding the distribution. Some have already gone up on Google Play and I’ll put up the rest anon. I may publish on other platforms as well, depending on my will to live. 

I hope this adoption of other platforms will be good for those readers who quite rightly don’t like dealing with Amazon.

However, these other platforms are ebook only. Only Amazon’s KDP offers paperbacks and hardbacks. 

Yes, the ebook prices have gone up, and I’ll be explaining that in another post, coming soon, but it’s basically because they are worth it. 

I have also given Weed a tweak — Hey! ‘Weed’ and ‘tweak’ rhyme internally, and ‘need’ and ‘read’ rhyme with Weed — how spookily coincident is that? Is that a message or what? 

Anyway, I’m calling the tweaked Weed the second edition.

So, here’s a list of those books on Apple and where to find them:

Weed

Sanctioned

Another Perfect Day in Fucking Paradise

King of the Undies World

The Underpants Tree

Un-Tall Tales

The Freebie