Twixt Iceland and the fried chicken takeaway lies scrote Nirvana

I OCCASIONALLY have to travel through what are best described as Scrote Estates. (Apparently we’re not allowed to use the word ‘chav’ anymore because if we do then we’re no better than fascists. Don’t ask me – some bloke in The Guardian said it.)

You know the kind of place: flat-roofed pub with a pair of Rottweilers leaning over the guttering, hoodies on mountain bikes riding on the pavement, the cross of St George hanging in bedroom windows long after we were expelled from Euro 2008. You lock the car doors on the way in and check that the carefully pre-damaged baseball bat is close at hand. (It’s for playing with the dog, officer. Look at the teeth marks on it.)

But I’ve now gathered enough evidence to put forward another theory. Presumably these people are officially poor, despite the overwhelming presence of the Magic Tin Leg of Money denoting another dodgy disability claimant. They can’t have much in the way of disposable income after the fags, the alcopops, the scratchcards and the Findus Crispy Pancakes have been paid for. So why, in every horrible, concrete, 1970s shopping precinct, usually in between the local branch of Iceland and a fried chicken takeaway, is there a tanning salon?

Why do poor people feel the need to look … well … orange? Do they think that they’ll be mistaken for Hollywood superstars who’ve just returned from a month on the Riviera? Do they think it’ll protect them from the indigenous scrote diseases of cancer and rickets?

Let’s face it: it’s not as if the tramp-stamped, thong-baring women need any help pulling after closing time at The Shivering Whippet. Their biggest problem is not spilling their chips while being serviced in the car park by a lad off the Waltzers at the local fair. Being bright orange isn’t going to help, beyond making it easier for the local Casanovas to find them in the dark.

Maybe it’s this WAG thing, whereby all teenage girls have only one ambition in life, and that’s to entrap a footballer of sorts and then appear in Hello! magazine at £250,000 a pop. The sad reality – for them - is that they instead fall pregnant to a nice Asian lad from the kebab shop and then spend the rest of their lives pretending to hobble round on the Magic Tin Leg of Money while buying fags, alcopops, scratchcards and Findus Crispy Pancakes. Still, at least the ‘brahn’ baby won’t need to avail itself of the tanning salon.

OUT HERE in the countryside, with Bastille Day gone, the combines have moved into the fields and a lemming-like tidal wave of rats, mice, voles and squirrels is heading for my garage where they’ll shred everything made of cloth, paper or plastic over the next month before giving birth to new legions of vermin in the debris.

I’ve tried shooting them as they advance, but the barrels of the Beretta soon glow red. The lurcher, having slaughtered more wildlife than a forest fire, a veritable canine Attila the Hun, has collapsed exhausted in front of the Aga licking his blood-stained jowls and refuses to set foot outside until there’s a hard frost.

So I went and bought a whippet. It was an accident really. I sat next to a bloke at the polo whose bitch had just had a litter, we went to look at them and that was that. Bring on another set of vets’ fees and damp patches in the hall.

He’s a game little thing, though. I took him to Pets ‘R’ Us to buy him a Barbour for winter and he was stood in front of the glass cases of bunny rabbits doing that twisty-head thing clever dogs do when this woman sauntered up.

“Oh, isn’t he lovely,” she said. “Are you buying him a friend?”

“No, love,” I said. “It’s an educational trip because I think it’s important that he sees where his food is going to come from.”

She stared at me for a full three seconds before running off. On the way out of the car park, I expected the armed response unit to descend upon me at any minute.

OUR PRIME Minister, who doesn’t even have a driving licence and who is chauffeured in luxury limo from banquet to beano, has decreed that we must all drive electric cars by the year 2020. How wonderful.

Now his pal Hilary Benn, the ridiculously vegetarian Minister in charge of the nation’s meat production, has weighed in by saying that rising fuel prices are A Good Thing because the cost of motoring will keep people off the roads, and that those rascals who own second-hand cars should be punished even further.

What planet are these people from? We don’t all live in Islington and work in Westminster. I have a 56-mile return journey to work. Many people commute even further. We do this because there is no suitable public transport solution unless we want to rock up at the office at 10.15am and leave again at 4pm. Three days a week.

And those evil buggers who are killing polar bears with their pollution-spewing second-hand cars? Guess why they’re driving a 1989 Ford Sierra? It’s because they’re poor and can’t afford a brand new £20,000 Toyota Prius milk float, stoopid.

And if they did have that money they’d blow it on a used convertible BMW Turbo Nutter Bastard anyway (plus extra trips to the tanning salon) because that’s human nature.

Sometimes I wish I was locked up in the Big Brother House, away from all this madness.