The Unbearable Lightness of Burnham
Take a deep breath. Breathe in. Breathe out. Relax.
Go to your happy place.
There is an ocean. You feel calm. A sunset paints the rolling sand-dunes in shades of red and gold. The distant sound of children laughing. Birds float and swoop in the sky, glittering shoals of fish can be seen beneath the surface of the crystal waters, and walking along the beach towards you, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and a sarong, is Home Office Minister Andy Burnham.
Andy approaches you. “Are you Andy Burnham?” you say, and in response he hands over a number of documents that verify his nature. As he passes these to you, a smile of great joy and satisfaction shimmers across his face, and he is bathed in a beatific light from all about. Two small birds fly down and perch on his outstretched arm, and sing the sweetest songs into his ear. A stoat blushes and flutters its eyelashes. Andy then says the following:
“I take the view that it is part of being a good citizen, proving who you are, day in day out.”
Breathe in. Breathe out. Relax.
You are in your happy place.
And now, from your happy place, ponder upon the marvel of Home Office Minister Andy Burnham, and upon how he can have acheived such a state of utter bliss and serenity that – despite growing up in the same country as you, despite knowing the same history as you, and despite his ostensible allegiance to a progressive cause – he can say something as gibberingly authoritarian as that without getting the irresistible urge to bite his own lips off. He must exist in a state of the most perfect, pure and untroubled calm, to not worry about what he’d just said, not even a little bit.
Basically, what I’m saying is, Andy Burnham’s Happy Place kicks your happy place’s ass. So there. But don’t worry – we all get to live in his happy place soon. Oh joy; oh joy unconfined. Oh f- (cont. on page 94)
