You can keep it

Well that's enough real life for now, thanks. You can't say I haven't given it a fair shake. 

I've been doing practically nothing but real life since I got the diagnosis five years ago. That's long enough to have formed a solid opinion based on hard facts. 

I once asked a friend what he thought about a TV programme from the distant past called Muffin the Mule:

"Tried it," he replied. "Didnae like it."

Well that's pretty much my verdict on real life. I might check back in five years, to see if the psychos, liars and bastards are still running our country, as well their own. But right now I'm going to focus on friends, family and writing, all of which raise my spirits, while current affairs have, for years, been dragging them down. 

There is a small problem, though, with having writing as your occupation and main method of relaxing. 

Critics excuse me while I spit.

Even my talented friend Gregor, who used to write a light-hearted fortnightly newspaper column, got the occasional bad review. I loved his stuff. So did almost everyone else. But you can't please all your readers. 

One serious-minded soul wrote to the paper, describing one of Gregor's offerings as "worthless and uninteresting small talk." Now despite his rugged looks and firm, well-muscled thighs, honed by cycling to a hardness that makes you  ... ahem, sorry. Despite all that, Gregor is a sensitive soul and he cried on my shoulder.

But only for a brief moment. Writers inhabit a world unknown to normal people, a world filled with rejection. The phrase you hear most often is "Not for me". I once got a rejection letter from some young punk straight out of journalism school who said he "aimed to discourage tired jokes and hoary old clichés".

Eventually though, if you persist, you find a few editors who like your clichés, offer kind words of encouragement and even pay you real money once a month. But to get there you have to turn a blind ear to countless critics, and maybe possess the kind of mentality that makes someone run straight at a bull.

So having been forged in the fires of rejection, Gregor soon wiped away his tears and doubled down on his trademark style of taking a lateral look at life and drawing lessons from the quirkier aspects he finds there. He wrote an entertaining piece on how he did his ironing, which his critic described as "ridiculous and juvenile" and the rest of us really enjoyed.

And isn't this, dear friends, a lesson to us all in these dark December days, made so much bleaker and more depressing by the prospect of five more years of Tory theft, hatred, ignorance and stupidity?

Don't let people talk you into giving up or changing what you know is right. Look after friends, family and anyone less fortunate than yourself. These bad times will pass. 

Scientific studies have shown that the vast majority of us are decent human beings, genetically predisposed to care for each other. The cruel, the greedy and the selfish are in the minority. They are running things now but they won't be forever. If nothing else, climate change might drown the fuckers when the Thames bursts its banks.

And if all that science can't cheer you up, take a look at Muffin the Mule, with his good friend Annette Mills. 

Why don't we sing along with Annette and see if the little chap will come out for us?

We want Muffin, Muffin the Mule,
Dear old Muffin, playing the fool,
We want Muffin, everybody sing,
We want Muffin the Mule.