I've told you a million times!

Exaggeration, embellishment and caricature add colour to our daily lives and liven up the dullest anecdote. “I just had the best sandwich like, ever!” is most certainly untrue but it harms nobody unless you count it as hammering one more little tack into the stair carpet of self-deception. Step by step, the use of carpet fitting as a metaphor for delusion has to be a stretch by anybody’s reckoning, but that’s what happens when you’re treading on the stairway to hyperbole heaven!

Kids do it all the time. They overstate, amplify and blow out of proportion every minute detail of their insignificant little lives while gorging on entertainment whose very essence is the inflation and intensification of the mundane to make its pixelated worlds appeal to senses dulled to mere reality. Nobody is going to buy a game that is ‘quite good, really’ or watch a movie that is merely ‘true to life’. Why settle for those when you can have an enlarged, overblown, heightened better-than-life, virtual reality?

And why bother with that sandwich at all unless it is truly going to be like, really, you know like the best sandwich like, ever? (While we’re on food, what’s the game with four-cheese pizza? Seriously, all pizza cheese tastes like it fell out of some upholstery; can it be that four types of spongy polymerised whey will somehow improve the experience and not just make it four times more mattressy? What is WRONG with you people?)

The news channels, presumably in order to compete with YouTube and its imitators engage in the sensationalisation of the ordinary. Thus fraudulent benefits claimants are misreported as master criminals, driveway disputes turn neighbours into inhuman creatures sent from the devil himself and every woman who has ever appeared in a soap opera becomes some sort of supermodel goddess the instant she gets pregnant. Is it too much to ask for the simple, unalloyed truth for once, instead of the romanticised, embroidered, larger-than-life world of the news and save words like ‘crisis’ and ‘horror’ for really horrible crises?

Thankfully, our political masters don’t engage in such shenanigans. They would never corrupt the bland machinery of government with fabricated and massaged statistics, or cooked-up accounting, would they? The incumbents or their opposition would surely never misquote, misrepresent or overestimate the effects of policy, or attribute to their counterparts motives that don’t really exist. Surely they would never dare? Nobody would fall for that, would they? Oh…

Thus profit is not just labelled as greed, but as ‘evil’. A reasonable desire to control the borders is called ‘disgusting racism’ by plants in the BBC Question Time audience and reporting of old, sick people dying of old age and sickness is popped in the pigeonhole marked ‘genocide’. Increasing welfare spending is decried as ‘slashing’ and 75p a week extra on the state pension is described as generous.

How in the world do they think they’re going to get away with it? Who in the world would believe the hype? Surely people can see through the bullshit and make up their own minds? Oh, hang on, that’s what quotas, dumbing down and diversity training are all about, isn’t it? So, by a process of pummelling and kneading and criminalising rational thought the population is brainwashing into compliant, docile, ‘somatose’ clones who clap and cheer and shout and jeer to order and accept outrageously overblown claims as accurate and reasonable.

Official! The biggest aspidistra in the world!

Exaggeration is absolutely the worst thing ever. I mean, exaggeration is like the biggest threat to our way of life we have ever faced. Exaggeration must be at least a million times worse than, say, Hiroshima! Now Excuse, I have this amazing sandwich to attend to…