Just try ordering a pint of Best now

"There's a terrible sadness amongst the gathered press and well-wishers, and we're really just waiting for....further news."

After days of the sombre gathering of the assembled press corps, George Best is dead. Across the country, there'll be a series of minutes silences and draped scarves as the people of the United Kingdom mourn the tragically early passing of the football legend. And we're a bunch of sick, ghoulish fucking hypocrites.

Face it, we take pleasure in the tragically early death of a celebrity. We're now calling it a tragedy and according him the same honours traditionally reserved for a million war dead. But if Best wasn't famous, he'd be just another pisshead slowly drinking himself to death in the eyes of the fickle hypocritical right-wing press; in who's eyes his death would be no-one's fault but his own for his lack of self control and lax morals. But he was famous, so it's completely obligatory to mourn him.

Of course, had he died in a pub at 4am, it would be the government's fault for it's new laws, which make it a criminal offence not to be in a coma on a nightclub floor in the middle of the night.

Maybe, just maybe, there's a chance that Best's death will remind us just how powerful and destructive the drug we all take for granted really is. He won't be the only person to be killed by his addiction this year. But fat chance of that; a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.