How Even Virtue-Signalling Costs a Fortune

How many of the emails in your inbox want your money? I don’t only mean the obvious direct sell ones. You know, like Charles Tyrwhitt, ‘shirtmakers of Jermyn Street’, though all of their shirts are made in the Far East – who, despite all my attempts to de-register from their mailing list continue to deluge me with emails. This may be because I once sent an email to their founder, upper-class twit Charles, to express my disgust at his support for Brexit and the hypocrisy of his business model. Their shirts are pretty crap too. None of them resist a cigarette-lighter.

And I don’t mean sweet innocents like Last Minute.com. At least they don’t pretend not to want money – except at the height of the lockdown when no-body was going abroad, when bored executives at their online agency started sending out emails with pretty pictures of exotic destinations and no way to get there. With taglines like, ‘Where is your favourite place to have sex ?’ (My answer was, on Donald Trump’s golf course on the 9th green. They did not even have the courtesy to acknowledge my perfectly serious opinion, probably because of my unthinking addition of ‘with you.’)

The massive load of purely commercial sellers of junk is a nightmare. Sum them all up: Gimme your money!

Apple TV, Netflix and the BBC are loyal purse-botherers. The former is now desperate enough to offer me the opportunity to ‘rent Bad Boys for life for only £2.99’. Well! If I wanted rent boys I wouldn’t get them from Apple. If I did, I would get stuck into a lifetime of upgrades to system 12.7.8 et seq, which upgrades never work and end up crashing my hard disc.

The dozens of leeches and vampires attracted to writers is awful- they all offer their expertise and their seminars and books about better writing and videos and podcasts, and if I were to even look at a tiny percentage, I would never have time to write. The most annoying is Curtis Brown. Do our Course, they cry. They have several courses. I tried one. Over £230 and I assure you, no CB person read anything I submitted to the Course, at least until I had paid a further £100 for a few pages of superficial inconsequence.

No, my rant today is about the high price of virtue. You see, my inbox is also jammed with perfectly good organisations, which are very keen to send me ‘updates’, because maybe I supported one of them, say Greenpeace, and as you know email lists are bought and sold on the market like politician’s promises. I’m not blaming Greenpeace necessarily, or the Green Party, or the legitimate campaigning organisations I do support (add Amnesty and FoE into this list) – they are all terribly worthy, and who can blame them for hawking their lists about a bit?

So here are some of the purse-botherers whose updates, slightly interesting as they are, always end with a begging-bowl.

Second thoughts. I’m not going to list them. They know who they are.

Listen here you guys and girls! I love you all and sometimes you tell me stuff that I didn’t read in the media. Sometimes. The rest of the time, you tell me some heartwrenching stuff I’ve been ranting about for days, then comes the ‘donate’ button. Hey! I would love to support you all! But now you’re driving me crazy, and the implicit message is ‘if you don’t donate Brexit will happen, Boris won’t agree to a UBI, Black Lives won’t matter, the NHS will be doomed to be sold to America and we, the sweet cosy little group of lovely people, are all that stands between ……. and the deep blue sea.’

Jeeeee whizzzzz.

We the Goodies are not made of money. That’s the other side. Besides, guys and girls, I’m just not sure virtue has to be paid for with the remains of my money.

Illustration: No reason. Just the pleasure I take not giving Pigrights another opportunity to rip me off for thousands more for ‘breach of copyright’. Pls note, pigrights: if anyone uses my illustration above without attribution, they’re welcome to it.

I. Love. You. All. Except Trump. And Pigwrites.