I am not amazed

I’ve got to be honest, I’m not often amazed. Confused, disinterested, sick to the very core of my cold, dead soul… but rarely amazed.


I’ll tell you what is bloody amazing, though. It’s amazing that so many people seem to have just this one adjective at their disposal. In fact, it’s nothing short of a bloody miracle that these people can make it through life, given that they seem to spend their days in a constant state of amazement. Surely permanent amazement must be a strain on the heart? Or the bowels?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely anti-amazement as a concept. I’ve never seen the northern lights, but I suspect they would justify being labelled as amazing. I would certainly describe the births of my kids as amazing (Iola might use slightly different terms) and I can see how the word could be applied to a range of circumstances.

But I’m afraid I fail to see how something like a fucking Coldplay gig, for example, would warrant such description. In fact, I fail to see how anything connected to that whining, self-important, slack-jawed sack of uselessness Chris Martin could ever be described as amazing, unless he lost it big time, hoovered up a bucket’s worth of Columbian marching powder, stripped naked and ran through the streets of London brandishing an axe, exclaiming to anyone within earshot that he is the reborn Jesus Christ, or something. In fact, I’d pay fucking good money to see that and would indeed be genuinely amazed. And delighted.

Yet it seems that Coldplay are exactly the sort of watery, anodyne consumer slop that has idiot-boxes up and down the land reaching for their single-word thesauruses. Keane, fucking Dido, Lily shitting Allen… I’ve heard them all described by dribbling morons as “amazing”.

For the most part, it’s just bloody lazy and inaccurate. For example, dead art bloke Tony Hart was described as “amazing” on the radio this morning by some bloke who had clearly only met him the once, in 1975. This was immediately followed by an explanation of our Tone’s amazing-ness. Apparently, he was “a normal, gentle bloke.” That’s right, a normal bloke. So it what bloody sense is that in any way “amazing”, for shitting crikey’s sake?

So, I give fair warning. The next time someone tells me direct to my face that they are amazed by something that is clearly in no-way amazing, I reserve the right to respond with the kind of out-of-proportion blind, ugly violence that will only cease with the intervention of the emergency services and will subsequently leave the police and their teams of psychologists perplexed.

Thank you.