If you’re obsessed with alcohol you’re an alcoholic. If its drugs, you’re an addict. Obsession with France is called Francophilia and if you’re obsessed with staring at the screen of a mobile phone you’re known as a Tosser. A total fucking tosser. Whereas someone who walks down a crowded London street in rush hour staring at a phone is known as an Absolute Dipshit. I have yet to learn what to call someone who is obsessed with other people staring constantly at phones and generally wishing them harm, though I’m toying with ‘Gorgeous’, ‘Saintly’ or ‘Me’. Staring at phones is an evil and incites violent tendencies in normally level, calm individuals and should be done seated or in private. Like while driving.

What about people obsessed with pets? They’re called Fish Fanciers, or Dog Lovers or Sheep Shaggers. And now there’s a ‘cure’ for when poor Rover, or Tibbles or Fido leaves his mortal messing in the park to chew the eternal slippers in doggy heaven. Not a ‘cure’ in that ‘Pet Semetary’ way (if you’ve never read it, do so only with great care and if your heart is strong), but in a new, hi-tech, super-scientific, cloney kind of way.

As a dog-indifferent myself who would no more want to own a dog than own an Arsenal shirt, I can’t see what all the fuss is about. Dog dies, get a new one. Literally: same shit, different day. But I know others who get attached to not just pets, generally, or dogs, generally, or even ‘Staffies’ generally, but with their own, personal, man’s best friend who’s been with them since puppyhood. The dogs, not theirs, though these are not necessarily mutually exclusive. And when Bonzo finally goes walkies skywards, they don’t want just any replacement, they want Bonzo back. The same. Not just in appearance, but the whole slobbering, dry-humping, sunday-roast-eating, ‘smiling’ (yeah, right) package.

So they can now clone your dog. Take some dna from old Patch, insert it into an egg, surrogate it to… well, probably another dog, or bitch really and however many months later, out pops new Patch. Think of the smile on your children’s faces as they view exactly the same beloved creature, but all puppified and delicious and ‘the same’. Ahhhhhhh.

But its not ‘the same’. My wife is a clone. She has an identical twin, thus they are genetically identical. But they’re not ‘the same’ at all. They’re very different people. Always have been. And they were ‘naturally produced’ and ‘reared in the same environment’. Whereas these little doggies, genetically identical that they unquestionably are, will not be ‘the same’. You can’t insert a gene for ‘personality’; it don’t work like dat. And tests on mice have shown that although they look the same at birth (a fucking mouse; they ALL look the same, just before you tread on them, then they become a Rorschach inkblot) they’ve tended to become very obese. Hmmm. Maybe someone’s been cloning Americans… hmmmmm…

So clone at your peril. Or just don’t bother replacing Jorge the Tibetan, just take your phone for a walk every day. Its much more interesting and doesn’t shit on the floor.

Happy wednesday

A xxxx