Sometimes writing for publication is a barrel of laughs. The other week I had a column "spiked", which is brilliant fun, because it means you've immediately got to write another one. You know the feeling when you think you've finished the washing-up, and then someone walks in carrying a baking tray with an inch-thick gunkcrust soldered to it, and they cheerfully plonk it down next to the sink and saunter away whistling, and you look at the pile and your soul starts crying? Well, it's a bit like that.
The replacement was a piece on spiders, which didn't turn out too badly, considering, although I forgot to include some advice I'd been given: apparently spiders have an aversion to conkers, so if you collect a load of conkers, and scatter them round your house, the eight-legged bastards stay away. Haven't seen one since, though that may be a coincidence. (Incidentally, I recommend conker-gathering as an afternoon activity that instantly makes you feel 10 years old again, even if an ecologically conscious passer-by did accuse me of "killing a tree" just because I was thrashing at the branches with a long stick.)
Anyway, the spiked piece was rejected on the grounds that it was offensive and made me sound crazy. The first line was, "Here's a sentence rarely used to open newspaper columns: why don't the vast majority of people just blow their own heads off?" and it continued in a similar vein throughout. I thought it was life-affirming, in a nihilistic, cackling-into-the-abyss kind of way, but there you go. Perhaps I'm ill. Doubtless it would've provoked complaints.
So the piece about spiders was printed instead. It also appeared on the Guardian's Comment is free site, where readers can leave comments, for free, like it says on the tin. And the very first comment read: "Come on. A boring piece of fluff about spiders? Where's the passion and intensity? Sort it out." You can't win.
Ironically, I first came to the attention of the "mass media" because I wrote a website jam-packed with "passion and intensity" - alongside bad language, grotesque mental imagery, and extreme scatological humour. Today, as part of the "mass media", those final three are the three tools I'm not allowed to employ, because the "mass" sadly encompasses "the humourless". None the less, there isn't a week that goes by when I don't try to sneak all three elements in, because they make me giggle. These excesses get cut before making it to print. My words go through a filter that's out of my control. I don't even get to write my own headings, you know. Oh, the humanity. It's like Stalinist Russia round here. Boo hoo, woe is me, etc.
No paper wants to gratuitously offend the reader. Pity, because gratuitous offence, when performed with aplomb, is the funniest thing in the world. There's more unpretentious joie de vivre in a single issue of vintage-era Viz than most artists or singers manage in a lifetime. I'd like nothing better than to fill the rest of this page with an unnecessarily florid description of something utterly disgusting happening to a well-known public figure - an 850-word fantasy in which, say, David Miliband unexpectedly develops extreme and explosive diarrhoea while entertaining a group of foreign dignitaries in a pod on the London Eye on the hottest day of the year, to take just one example. But I can't, because a tiny handful of you would complain.
In my view, the delight such an unnecessary and puerile description would give to myself and others far outweighs the pain it would cause these oversensitive life-spoiling idiots. The offended people.
I hate offended people. They come in two flavours - huffy and whiny - and it's hard to know which is worst. The huffy ones are self-important, narcissistic authoritarians in love with the sound of their own booming disapproval, while the whiny, sparrowlike ones are so annoying and sickly and ill-equipped for life on Earth you just want to smack them round the head until they stop crying and grow up. Combined, they're the very worst people on the planet - 20 times worse than child molesters, and I say that not because it's true (it isn't), but because it'll upset them unnecessarily, and these readers deserve to be upset unnecessarily, morning, noon and night, every sodding day, for the rest of their wheedling lives.
Note I used the word "sodding" there, because even though every single one of you knows precisely what word I meant to use, I'm not allowed to use it in print in case the whiny/huffy Axis of Feeble decides to piddle its pants with dismay at the sight of a commonplace assembly of letters. And they must be appeased at all times.
What these nitpicky, sexless complainists fail to realise is that sweary tastelessness is a celebration of life, as soaring and majestic as a gospel choir in full flow, and no amount of tedious squeamishness can alter that. Potentially offended reader - you are the offence. In fact you're a four-letter word beginning with "c" and ending in "t". Yes. That's right. You're an absolute clot.
· This week Charlie finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy ("which might as well come with a razor-sharp spine, so you can slash your wrists once you've finished it"). He continued playing Bioshock on the Xbox360 ("but I can only play it if someone's in the room with me, because it's too scary to tackle alone"); and he failed to quit smoking for the 18 millionth time.