It is a challenge to imagine the moral life of a gun-runner - at any rate, one who sells to the highest bidder regardless. But it isn't impossible. With a little imagination, the idea of profiting vastly while inflicting distant suffering is easy enough to grasp. One can, at least, picture the gun-runner as a member of the same species as you and I, with some self-awareness: 'yup, I sell guns and people I'll never meet are going to die, and that's fine and dandy, thank you for asking.'

But this is a painless feat of mental gear-shift compared with trying to see through the eyes of a library book soiler. I have an example here in my hands: a book's-worth of biro-work by one of these supremely self-serving little twats. Line after line scrawled with blue pen - pen! - so that this nobhead can get the facts a little more firmly established in their unimaginably vapid little mind. How must these creatures see the world? Entirely as a source of material to be chewed up for their own ends; a slime-mould-like solipsism is their modus operandi. In the famous moving words of Anakin Skywalker, I hate them.

It makes me angry. Only one other thing makes me angrier: the mannerless conspiracy of barstaff and pub customer to usurp the ancient natural rights built into the fabric of every English pub. There is an order to being served, and everyone should damn well make sure they're socially aware enough for a collective bar of beer-seeking agents to achieve a fair and gentlemanly emergent serving system. It's not hard, it really isn't.

But no. No-one cares any more. We're jauntily nudging each other off to Hell in a wheelbarrow. There's a line that runs through biro-weilding university savages and cow-eyed 'gimme beer n I don't care how I get it' selfishos: they're both polluted with the foamy green cancer of 'me me me' and its eaten out all remnant of fellow feeling. And as more and more have turned the Thatcherite Turn, the very weave of our once-great society has come to cotton shreds in our ha...

Sorry.