I generally consider myself to be a calm person. I don’t tend to do ‘rage’ but a whole series of things seem to have combined to send me over the edge recently.

Hazel Blears is partly responsible for my decent into a world of venom, her and all the other literally mindless members of the cabinet whose attention is now placed firmly in self-preservation mode regardless of the long term consequences for this country.

I don’t expect much of politics to be honest. If you are an MP with personal ambition in one of the three main political parties you have by definition given up on the idea that political beliefs can evolve. You have tied your colours to one mast and are now forced to spend all of your time writhing around within reach of it under the glare of the media, even if your conscience is screaming at you to selflessly dash yourself on the rocks. Unless your beliefs are more important to you than you’re own career prospects, of course, but lets not flatter ourselves to think we live in that kind of democracy.

But it’s not just politicians that are driving me insane. Next up come the ‘bankers’ and the apparent surprise emanating from the public that these people are driven by personal greed! The fact that they have all run off with the nation’s wealth, leaving an entire generation of Britons to flail about in a depressive mire, should not really be that much of a surprise. That’s what bankers are supposed to do. That’s the whole point of letting a market define it’s own rules. A certain type of person, devoid of what most of us would consider morals, makes as much money as possible from a giant pyramid scheme as quickly as they can before getting out just as the giant casino they were ‘working’ within collapses completely. The more money they make in this way the more likely they are to get knighted. The Government will always step in and bail out these people because these bankers are not playing with their own money, they are toying with the nation’s perceived wealth. Now it appears that by having pensions and getting ourselves into debt and generally living beyond our means over the past fifteen years we’ve done the collective equivalent of replying to an email from a man in Nigeria who wants to deposit some vast sum in our bank account no questions asked. Now we’re left to moan about the fact that that same man has just buried a pickaxe in our collective head while laughing hysterically at our unbridled stupidity.

These bankers are selfish uncaring bastards, yes, but that’s what they’re supposed to be. It’s our own fault. It was by allowing them to be utterly self-serving and to trounce all over the idea that we need to live in a community rather than Britain PLC that would apparently allow us all to become so much richer. Err, well that’s what they said, but now we can see that for the heap of shit that is was. They seem to be richer while we now have the largest national debt since records began. This ingenious bit of spin is called the ‘trickle down effect’ and it allows selfish people to make huge fist-fulls of cash conscience free - they tell themselves that it is precisely their selfishness that allows the rest of us mere mortals to afford Sky TV. It’s for OUR benefit that these people should be allowed to accrue vast financial wealth and crap all over this country. Because they throw us their loose change in the form of taxes that then allows us to build new hospitals. (Oh no, thanks to PFI those are on the nation’s credit card too..) We really don’t know how lucky we are though and we mustn’t scare these people off by making them pay more tax, because then they might decide to set themselves up in another countries financial system and that would inevitably lead to our financial system and our economy collapsing completely! Err, it already has hasn’t it? We should pay their airfare to get out of here asap.

If only we were living in a JG Ballard novel, then a ‘terrorist’ organisation would have sprung up by now, intent on justice by torturing and finally assassinating all these greedy banking bastards and the politicians that let them get away with it for so long, but of course we are all far too civilised to let anything like that happen.

The thing that irritates me most about all this though is the fact that the ‘experts’ given so much airtime, screen time, and column inches while everyone was happy ‘making money’, not to mention the politicians who lapped up this corporate ideology and pulled any remaining teeth from the mouth of the FSA - who let’s not forget didn’t see this coming and presided over what we now know to be a totally discredited system - are now the people we’re turning to to solve the crisis! They have some nerve, don’t you think? The MP’s in the House of Commons and the people in every boardroom of every bank and corporate structure that believed in the ‘free market’ and the mantra of constant economic growth should have resigned on mass out of shame. We need a forest fire in the halls of the measurable world before we can sort out this mess once and for all. But no. All those to blame are still in power and now have the nerve to give us advice on what we should do next! It’s like coming home to find your house on fire and asking the man standing sheepishly next to it, with a can of petrol in one hand and a box of matches in the other, if he’s got any ideas how to put out the raging inferno that he set alight.

I’m also rather pissed off with the board of my beloved Southampton FC for destroying the football club I’ve supported for nearly three decades because of their total lack of financial judgement.

But the thing that has really knocked me over, pulling away the last straw rug from under me if you will, is the recent discovery that my brain will never allow me to truly be as happy as it tells me is possible because, existentially speaking, my brain has an idea of perfection that real life can never live up to on account of real life being real. My brain, however, can make up what it likes and then tease me with the impossibility of what my life could ‘be’ every waking moment. Causing me to be whipped and battered by the impossibility of an image of happiness or perfection that I now know I will never reach, because this image only resides in my head. This knowledge leaves me feeling slightly hollow. Like the anticlimax when Arthur Dent arrives back in time towards the end of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. All of a sudden there doesn’t seem to be much to aim for.

Having said that I am happy, I do feel happiness, but it is here, under my nose, not somewhere exotic or far away. That should be re-assuring, and in some ways it is, but it allows no possibility of etheral escape. There are no ifs and buts. There are no luxurious unknowns. Even with all this madness going on it seems the only real happiness that’s truly available is what’s right here, right now.

Splendours and Miseries of the Brain by Semir Zeki is available from amazon