Just before heading off to today’s UK Uncut HSBC-Pay Your Tax protest, I read, by coincidence, a very weird article which, inadvertently, laid out everything that is wrong with the world and proved again, inadvertently, why screwed priorities are not just a feature of the banking industry, but a feature of so much of our world.

The article was this thing (I’m kind of presuming it was meant seriously and wasn’t just some joke that I missed, being a humourless old lefty bag who needs a good plucking) about getting older, but looking younger, while emptying your wallet on trash such as “Vaishaly Signature Facials” for £100, or a “Philips Lumea” hair-plucker thing for £450 (though I bet that wouldn’t look like 450 quid after a session with my bikini line heh heh heh) and something called Accent Treatment by someone called Dr Frances Prenna Jones for £250, and once again I just thought about kicking a hole in my laptop and racing down to the Guardian to show That Rusbridger exactly what a 40+ unwaxed fanny looks like and then to watch his jaw crash past his own ageing front arse as the whole truth dawned…

The truth is that there is something seriously wrong with a world in which such things as a Signature Facial and a Philips Lumea even exist and with a world where women in particular feel that they must subject themselves to this trash just to stay presentable and to stay relevant – the irony being, of course, that all this crap is designed to divert women and, by diverting them, to shut them up and, by shutting them up, to make them irrelevant . It can be hard to devote your life to fighting for social security, for example, when you’re obsessed with your spreading crows’ feet and the small hairs that grow out of them. I know these things, because I’m over 40 and I used to look young, when I was young, and now I don’t. The thing is – I like being over 40. I’ve got about 1000000000000000000 miles on the clock and you can tell it’s been fun just by counting the rings.

I digress.

To the protest, which was also about societal priorities:

The video below is from this morning’s UK Uncut protest outside the HSBC on Regent Street. They turned the place into a foodbank for a while. Said UK Uncut: “Activists argue that 500,000 people are now dependent on food banks as a direct result of the government’s austerity policies. HSBC is being targeted for its use of tax havens and the action comes the day after the release of the G20 action plan for tackling corporate tax avoidance.”

The hell with it, I thought this morning. I’ll get on the bus. I’ll go. The world’s bloody doomed and Iain Duncan Smith has destroyed social security while the rest of the political class lies around wanking and there is no political opposition to speak of and some people seriously appear to be ignoring all of that in the interests of filling up column inches with dispatches from the Philips Lumea campaign against arse hair, but I’ll go. Because at the very least, these protests do the one thing that a hard-nosed media and political opposition should and would do if we actually had a hard-nosed media and political opposition – they draw a direct line between the over-indulged banking sector and the hardship that so many others are suffering to keep the financial sector and big corporates like Serco and G4S in style.

In today’s case, the protest drew that direct line between the banking sector and the appalling growth of “facilities” like foodbanks. These protests serve as some sort of reminder that the financial sector is responsible for crashing living standards and a recession that the political class has used to justify the slaughter of social security. Standing outside the HSBC with a sign that says as much points the finger of blame back at the right target. If nothing else, that’s a major achievement. At the very least, I feel that history will view it as more of an achievement than a £450 twat wax.

But what would I know.

Here is my video: