At the ‘last supper’ of our Devon & Cornwall world tour last Friday, wonderful dinner, small dining room, there was inevitable blah, blah, blah with the couple on the next table. He was old. An Englishman who moved to New Joisey in 1960 and lived there ever since. She a bit younger, second wife, also English, now a nurse ‘over there’. Damned Yanks. Now you know as much as I do about this couple. He is in fact a retired optician and they were over for a wedding. So far so good, in that ‘few glasses of wine, fabulous meal, tables 3 feet apart, kind of way’. He had a curious accent that was 1 part Artful Dodger, 3 parts Goodfellas. And all was well until we mentioned our trip to Ground Zero. At which point The Man (never asked his name, certainly not after what followed) leaned over and informed me quietly but firmly, that the whole disaster that was 9/11 was ‘done by the American government, you know?’ No, I didn’t know that, in fact, did you?

Well, apparently, the ‘evidence’ that it wasn’t all as we thought is ‘massive’. That the hole in the Pentagon wasn’t plane-shaped. That the World Trade Center towers came straight down, causing no damage to adjacent buildings, and that would never happen, that photographic evidence is overwhelming that Al Quaeda couldn’t have done it, therefore the FBI, the CIA, Homeland, whoever, did it themselves. And he was serious. I sat there with my mouth open, aghast, with some half-chewed beetroot risotto with smoked bream pate and a hint of parsley reduction just kind’a hanging off my lower lip. Not my best look.

I asked, as you have to, what could possibly have been the motivation of the American government to murder 3000 of its own citizens, most of them registered voters, destroy half of New York and upset the entire world? The answer was that enabled the invasion of Iraq and changed the way airports are secured so that the good people of the USA can be better kept track of. He wasn’t big on motivation. Wasn’t as relevant in his eyes as the ‘evidence’, which was as huge as anything generally is in the world of the paranoid conspiracy theorist.

Strange how from one moment talking to a ‘normal guy’ changes in an instant and a switch trips in my head. The one that turns on the ‘nutter alert’. And he went on and on and on and on about this ridiculous theory. No, not just a ‘theory’, this is the only way it could have happened.

Then yesterday I read that within 2 years all taxis will take credit cards. And I came up with my own conspiracy theory.

When someone is at the cash register paying for a packet of chewing gum with a debit card, I simply want to kill them. Do these people not carry 50p in cash? So that the entire purchase process can be done with in 20 seconds instead of 20 minutes? Yet we are all encouraged to be ‘cashless’ and damn the queues of frustrated purchasers waiting behind you.

Yet if every transaction is electronically registered, even paying a taxi fare, the government know so much more about us. And so does HMRC. Taxi drivers all earn £200,000 a year, but only declare £26.72, after expenses, petrol and window cleaning sprays. The rest is all cash and no-one’s any the wiser. Until 2 years time, when they’ll know everything.

So Micheal Caine can lodge 15 million in a tax ‘avoidance’ scheme but a taxi driver can’t take a tenner to buy a surgical support for his disabled child… (can you ever have enough pathos?)

Happy Friday; go to the cashpoint today and draw out a handful. Fuck the government.

A xxxx