Is that you'll get stuck on this drunk shitty island for the rest of your life, each God awful day bleeding into the next, your unbearable British life made worse by Raj the cashier at the Tesco Express in South Croydon. 

 

Standing in front of another out of order sign, another unsmiling, unresponsive Tesco Express employee - or, yet again, at the bottom of that Marks and Spencer escalator, the one that hasn’t moved for the last sixteen and a half years 

 

After living here for seven and a half unbearable years, I've learned to never withdraw cash on a Sunday morning without bringing a latex glove because, predictably, every single cash machine in the nation will be covered in pub sick 

 

Limbering up before you hit the high street because in order to get up and down that sidewalk (the one no wider, or dryer, than a slip-n-slide) - you’ll need to suck in your gut and do a sideways shimmy, gripping your walker with mean treads, trying once again not to slip - like you did the last time, and the time before that 

 

Yes, the danger is that at some point you’ll no longer find it odd that a post office is located inside a convenience store, in the far back corner near the Doritos, where you’ll find a woman in a red royal mail shirt, scrolling through an iPhone, expertly avoiding potential customers by ever so carefully positioning her head behind a bargain rack of DVD’s 

 

Another wiff of Peppermint Schnaaps on my dentist's breath  

 

A National Health Service doesn't actually see patients 

 

An entire rack of Sainsburys past due strawberries 

 

Graham Norton's beard 

 

 

 

Four years of value added taxes and council taxes and stamp dutty taxes and TV taxes and walking and speaking and just existing taxes  

 

Hell, I can't even afford to eat because the Sainsbury's Superstore is four miles away and those four miles will cost me seven hundred pounds in diesel fuel 

 

Walk?  

 

How?  

 

I broke my ankle nine weeks ago and the NHS refused to treat me, the receptionist 'self care' pamphlet  

 

Yes, the real danger is that you’ll end up like me, surrounded by piss and sick, thin lips and mash 

 

Beaten down, broke 

 

Stuck, stranded, suicidal 

 

Unable to leave