My best New Year’s Eve was 15 years ago. A mis-calibrated dose of prescription painkillers in a bed and breakfast near Wootton Courtenay meant I slept through the whole thing. I slept through the fear. I slept through the dread. I slept through the recriminations and regrets. And I slept through Jools Holland insisting on playing inappropriate boogie-woogie piano with – who will it be this year? – Peter Brötzmann, Napalm Death, Youssou N’Dour, Mark and Roxanne from LadBaby, or the future festive ghost of his own grinning self.

This New Year’s Eve I lay on my back in the garden, long after midnight, belly full of Butty Bach™ ® beer and mini Quorn™ ® sausages, and looked at the stars. Do they have elections on those distant worlds, I wondered? Is there an alien Dominic Cummings, and if so, how would you know? Does the alien Sir Iain Duncan Smith eat his own mucus in public like our Earth Sir Iain, or does he just eat crisps? On Alien Sir Iain’s world is crisp-eating considered disgusting, while finger-picked mucus is the cuisine of the Princesses of Mars? And is that the space Jennifer Arcuri dancing round the Pole Star? Remember her? Thought not.

Sniffing the air, I suddenly realised I had accidentally laid my head in fox excrement. I did not know what I should do. Beat the fox responsible to death with a Remain-voting baseball bat, while cross-dressed in a kimono, like a sick metropolitan elitist? Or wear red and white finery and harry it with hounds, before tearing its body to shreds and smearing its blood upon a nearby child’s crying face, like a rural Tory voter merely upholding an ancient tradition threatened by political correctness gone mad? (Delete as applicable to suit your social and political prejudices.)

Then I regained my composure, and simply lay there in the wet dark, the year yet young around me, grinding my head into the fox faeces, mashing it luxuriously into my precious remaining hairs. Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ Get-Brexit-Done Johnson is prime minister. And I may be lying in the garden with fox excrement in my hair, but I’m looking up at the stars.

Apparently, the communications satellites that now clog the skies mean astronomers and astrophysicists will soon have their view of outer space fatally obscured. But we need those communication satellites. Otherwise how would we know, for example, quite how many people were disgusted by the presence of two black children in the new Worzel Gummidge, and by association the size of the Venn diagram overlap between fans of magic talking scarecrows and White Supremacists?

“It’s unrealistic to say black people live in the countryside, even if they are orphans who have been sent there. The countryside is where magic talking scarecrows live. Not fantasy black people,” they crow. The online debate about the Great Replacement Theory in action at Scatterbrook Farm echoes out into the spaceways for ever, a cosmic memorial to mankind’s noblest sentiments.

I squint upwards. Something shoots across the sky. Is it Turds, spaffing up the wall of the heavens, just because he can? Is there anyone out there at all? Presumably those far-distant alien minds, immeasurably superior to ours, are about to have their observation of us permanently suspended too, unless they can see through the satellite screen. Among their final views of our world will have been Turds hiding in a fridge, public nosepicker Sir Iain Duncan Smith celebrating his knighthood with a fingerful of fresh green, and all life on Earth drowning and choking and burning to death in real time all around us, flapping like an expiring fish, stranded on a beach.

Sadly, the curious aliens will never know how our story ends, though they could have a reasonable guess that it won’t end well. I close my eyes in the new year night and inhale the heady musk, a fox faeces visionary. In the crystal ball of my mind, Australian boat people flounder in the channel in cork-decorated hats, and sunburnt cockneys scrabble at the recently fortified Scottish border for the last of the Highland Spring. Turds is in a dream home in New Zealand, making jokes in Latin as he heads to the shelter with a young researcher on one arm and a nervous rescue dog on the other. “Veni, vidi, vici!”

But who is to blame for the aliens’ view of Earth being blocked? It is, in part, a man called Elon Musk, who is a billionaire genius philanthropist and not a brand of aftershave with both aphrodisiac and organ-elongation properties. Elon Musk is always included on Dad’s Christmas list, alongside novelty socks, a Liam Neeson DVD and a Liam Gallagher album. Mother was exhausted on Boxing Day. Father had been at the Elon Musk again.

The billionaire genius philanthropist Elon Musk, of SpaceX, is like a rubbish DC Comics copy of the billionaire genius philanthropist Tony Stark, of Stark Industries, from Marvel Comics’ Iron Man. “What is this Musk character’s company called?” asks the editor, to a desk-chained cartoonist, who has already signed away all his rights. “SpaceX,” he replies. “Will that do?”

Musk’s SpaceX company is about to shoot 40,000 satellites skyward, enhancing broadband, but blocking astronomers’ view of the universe, and dotting the same heavens our ancestors marvelled at with tens of thousands of artificial points. It’s New Year’s Day. The sky is lightening. As I struggle to stand I realise I am now the weight of a middle-aged man who suddenly dies at the wheel of a Ford Focus in a local newspaper report. So I make a resolution. And one by one the stars all go out.