I actually do predict an actual riot!

Right, first off, to persuade you that the content of this post is much better than it actually is, I want you to stop, open a new window, and listen to this song. It's the new single by The Indelicates, 'The Recession Song', feat. Nicky Biscuit and Mickey from Art Brut. I have been stamping around to it all day; it takes a very special song to make my heart hammer like a tiny flywheel, and this is it.

There's trouble in America, trouble you can touch
You can't go to rehab 'cause it costs too much!
No career, no hope, no fun no fashion
Thank fuck for the fucking recession!

Several posts are cooking, delayed in the ether by other journalism, the kind of writing which I enjoy less but which might possibly pay me enough to carry on eating duchy's original prescription medication, smoking finest gold leaf and keeping the boyfriend in gin and ribbons. I have what I believe to be some incredibly subtle and well-reasoned ideas about what the commentary on Ivan Cameron's death says about the nation, but I'm so damn angry about everything else right now that I just don't trust myself to reason well, or to be tactful in any way. So you'll just have to live without my stunnning insights there. The discussions from Monday's post really did get me thinking, though; would anyone be interested in a separate post about the private school system, if I promised to try and keep it mostly free from disgusting middle-class guilt?

Oh, also: if you woke up this morning even vaguely satisfied with the state of the world, check out the Daily Mail Racial Purity Test, published to great acclaim yesterday. I'm actually not actually joking. Sunder Katwala, Chair of the Fabian Society, has a fantastic response over at Liberal Conspiracy. Essentially, guys, it's not enough to have been born here - both of your parents have to have been born here, and all of your grandparents as well, or you simply aren't German British. That counts me out then, as I don't have even one British grandparent. Perhaps I'll write to them and explain that, whilst I am a lefty and a shortarse, it's not my fault, because I'm a filthy furriner and I don't know any better, and anyway Frank Field says that I won't have a detrimental affect on community cohesion because, yknow, I'm white.

Or perhaps they can get to fuck. I'm PROUD of my immigrant heritage. I have the dark eyes and curves of my mother's Maltese family, the pale skin and fine dark hair of my father's Lithuanian roots; I have the work ethic of my immigrant Jewish family and when I get drunk I sing like my Irish cousins. I was born in the heart of London. This city pounds in my blood with its thousands of cultures and races, its colours, its music and its misery. I'm glad that on my daily walk to the tube I can hear Turkish and Polish and Hindi and Swahili being spoken; that on my way home I can stop and buy halva, or sour cabbage soup or a fresh pide for my tea, or best of all, staggering back high and dazed from a night out, I can stop at the corner shop and pick up a stick of rose kulfi, which is the absolutely nicest thing ever and tastes like a rose might taste if it made love to a mini milk lolly in the back of a seedy pink limousine coated in sugar. I'm proud to live in the most racially diverse city in the world - there are not many things that make me proud of my country right now but that's one of them. Living here has made me a wiser, more knowledgeable and more tolerant person, and I believe that one should only be patriotic about the bits of one's country that challenge you to be better than you are.

I had more to say, but the corner shop shuts in ten minutes and I've made myself want kulfi now. Hold that thought.