Dear Marmalade Trust, Please Stick Your Loneliness Awareness Week UP YOUR ARSE!

If it exists, there’s an Awareness Week dedicated to it – or a month if truly fashionable – just as there will be pornography of it and Lenny Henry finding it racist.

Wait long enough and there will be Can’t Make Up Mind What To Watch On Telly Anxiety Awareness Week.

Nothing it seems is safe anymore from the spotlight, especially if it is part of the rich tapestry of pretend illnesses for Generation Snowflake, who in true Huxley fashion are unable to function unless there’s a medicine to swallow for it and a head shrink to say ‘there, there diddums.’

Of course loneliness is an issue – for some. The issue however with Loneliness Awareness Week however is twofold.

1. Who the f**k appointed these skeets to be in charge of Loneliness Awareness Week?

Answer: no one. It’s another example of the self-important appointing themselves in charge, in the ultimate hope that at the end of it all someone in officialdom will start to fling taxpayers’ money at them for doing so.

2. No one appears to acknowledge – in a world of increasing collectiveness – the right of people to be alone anymore.

It was bad enough a few years ago, where the odious practice of funeral flashmobbing began. Living in peace and quiet alone in some care home in some obscure little village after a lifetime of seeing the horrors of two world wars and no one caring a flying duck about the contribution you made to your society, and you can be sure the moment you are dead some skeets will come along and turn your quiet farewell into a media and general arsehole feeding frenzy.

Not because any of them cared about you, but because they want to feel good about themselves, pat themselves on the back for being so ‘compassionate’ to a corpse, in much the same way a child is compassionate to a doll or stuffed toy – some of the emotion may be genuine, but ultimately it’s all just play, all just entertainment, in a society of fake emotions, fake science, fake sexualities, fake genders, fake morality, fake f**king, fake orgasms, fake food, fake, fake, fake.

You can be sure these will be the same ones who find saying hello to their neighbours beneath them. It’s one of the things you notice about mainland Britain. Ireland has become just as bad. On the Isle of Man, Come Overs get very quickly put in their place if they start that skeetery. It is probably the same on most of the small islands around the British Isles – the sort of communities which cannot afford the prevalence of ‘urban’ attitudes where people are only interacted with in terms of immediate usefulness.

At least the dead are out of it.

The living meanwhile now have a society where no one is allowed to not want to be surrounded by people, to vomiting their every thought process to the world on social media and to everyone at their school, college, university, workplace, voluntary work colleagues … again, not out of any compassion but purely for seeking entertainment – everywhere and everything is a Big Brother, Love Island, etc. episode. If it was out of compassion, barriers would be respected, the little ‘I’m alright, thanks’ would not be treated as if you had just said, ‘go fuck yourself with a wire hairbrush you nosey bastard’.

Too far? Shyness is now listed by clinical psychologists as a mental illness. Let that sink in. Being a quiet, retiring type who enjoys their own company and privacy is now regarded officially as a threat by society at large.

It is officially classified as ‘Social Anxiety Disorder.’ You have to be at least somewhere on the autism ‘spectrum’ too. There are pills for it – nefazodone (which destroys your liver), venlafaxine (which causes mood swings and headaches) and sertraline (which can cause feelings of electric shocks). The punishment pills of a world which increasingly will not leave you alone.

Covid 19 was a blessing for the shy. At last, a world determined to be in your bloody face every chance it got forced to piss off. A first world in blind panic at not being able to voyeur at every little thing you do and expecting you to join in the great Mass Observation of a society where every day is a Happening.

Now the old world is back. But only if we let it. Not me.

Don’t wanna be the bad guy,
Don’t wanna make a soul cry,
It’s not that I love myself,
I just don’t want company,
Just me myself I,
Me myself and I,
Just me myself I.

I sit here by myself,
And you know I love it,
You know I don’t want someone,
To come pay a visit,
I wanna be by myself,
I came in this world alone,
Me myself I …