The week after next, British prime minister Tony Blair will be gone after 10 years in power. Not soon enough, laments Rosemary Behan.
Only 11 days to go and he'll be gone. Hallelujah! Or, as they say in Arabic, alhamdulillah! Anyone who has survived 10 years of Tony Blair and emerged with their sanity intact deserves a medal.
Some, of course, haven't survived - a few hundred thousand innocent Iraqis and those interned in Guantánamo are closest to mind.
But it hasn't exactly been easy on the rest of us. Each week brings a raft of new initiatives so mad, so pointless and ultimately counter-productive that record numbers of people are emigrating. It's been the longest-running farce since The Mousetrap.
In the last week alone, proposals for new anti-terrorist legislation promise to leave a legacy of arbitrary state control as well as mere failure and incompetence. Based on the fact that "there is a real risk of a terrorist attack in places of public congregation", John Reid, the British home secretary, plans to give police powers to seize the passports of people they "suspect" are heading abroad for terrorism-related purposes. This could be anyone.
We're also considering the possibility of extending beyond 28 days the period for which police can hold people without charge. Police claim an extension of up to 90 days is needed to investigate terrorist trails across the world. How convenient that this also gives them that bit longer to extract a confession.
Meanwhile, on leaving office, Tony Blair is to create a global foundation with the aim of fostering "greater understanding" between Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Is this some sort of sick joke? Could anyone have done more to promote sectarianism and hatred in the Middle East?
The government's approach to integration hasn't done too well at home, either. After loudly announcing that immigrants should be encouraged to speak English, it now turns out that ministers have frozen funding for these courses. To raise the required funds the newly-created Commission for Cultural Integration and Cohesion has recommended a block on the £100 million spent annually on translation services.
But down at my local library in Newham in east London, the message doesn't seem to have got through. Before I could join the library, I was forced to fill out a form to declare my ethnic origin. Being half-English, half-Irish, this was particularly meaningless. The tickable boxes included "White English" or "White Irish". What a horrible exercise.
Exasperated, I simply wrote "I do not think of myself in these terms" and left it at that. But it didn't end there. I was given a "welcome pack" which welcomed me to the library in 18 different languages and was informed that should I require a printed translation in any one of 21 different languages, I should call the designated helpline.
Not content with prying into the precise nature of our ethnicity, the government has also raised the spectre of the "foetal Asbo". The Nurse Family Partnership programme, which targets "disadvantaged" mothers-to-be for a special education programme, claims it will "help poor families build on the aspirations they have for their children".
When did it become the state's role to police our pregnancies? It won't be long before certain people are banned from having children. Perhaps they could be "chemically castrated", as John Reid this week promised would happen to convicted paedophiles.
There is also "help" for those who want to quit smoking before the public ban comes into force on July 1st. Anti-smoking pills are to be provided free on the NHS. One of the choices of anti-smoking pills, Zyban, is also an anti-depressant, which I suppose makes state interference in your personal life more bearable. In case the pills don't work, those who smoke will also be banned from adopting children under five.
Middle-class wine drinkers, too, find themselves at the centre of a crackdown. According to a Whitehall spokesman: "We want to target older drinkers, those that are maybe drinking one or two bottles of wine at home each evening. They do not realise the damage they are doing to their health and that they risk developing liver disease. We are not talking here about the traditional wino."
Does the government see no connection here? If it wasn't for the drink, we'd all be mad - or dead.
Rosemary Behan is a journalist based in London.