Messing about on the river

I woke, as usual, two minutes before my clock-radio heralded the new day and immediately I could feel it. Something was different. As I lay there, waiting for the distinct click-ON and a bit of vhf chatter before the news, I listened to the barely-there sound of my wristwatch on the bedside table. The teeniest and tiniest of clacks, as the automatic mechanism slowly wound down.

Impatient, I slipped into a tee-shirt and bare-foot padded over to the window. I threw the curtains wide to greet the dawn, a splendid, red affair which streaked across the sky, no doubt in breach of several statutes, but what did it mean? I really must get my head around what colour sky in the morning means warning. Blue? Black, red, pink? It could be any of them. (And just how much blue sky do you actually need to make a pair of sailors' trousers?)

My grapple with ill-remembered weather lore was interrupted by the news theme and I settled back into bed to listen…

The government, it announced, had finally got the deficit under control and the economy was growing steadily, outpacing most developed countries. The trials of venal politicians were drawing to a satisfactory conclusion and cells were being prepared in anticipation of the correct verdicts and sentences being handed out. The repatriation of foreign criminals and illegal immigrants continued apace, following the collapse of the various corrupt and ultimately illegal European institutions and successful re-devolution of powers back to home ministries. Good news. All good news.

A baleful police siren wailed in the distance and a helicopter clattered overhead. I caught a brief glimpse out of the window then tuned the radio to the local station. A live feed broadcasts events in real time and it was reassuring to hear the tracking down of criminals before breakfast. What wonderful times we live in, I thought to myself.

The police, now free of all their diversity and human rights targets, could concentrate on bringing to justice known felons and troublemakers without the restraints imposed by the disgraced and disbanded Crown Prosecution Service. In a time of booming prosperity, the only sector where unemployment was rising was in the fields of human rights, criminal defence and discrimination law. Now that everything was prosecuted on sheer common sense, the thieves, muggers and rapists were being locked up and kept locked up and the petty fallers-by-the-wayside were being firmly brought back into line.

I made tea and stared out of the kitchen window. Birds singing in the hedgerows, the slow drone of an airliner high overhead and a feeling of peace and security… and *click*

The radio alarm blared into life, shocking my slumbering body awake. My heart pounded as I adjusted to my new state and grimly opened my eyes against the full daylight. Afternoon nap – I do like an afternoon nap (It says so, right at the top of the page there, d’y’see?) – but they sometimes come with the most vivid dreams.

Was it too much to hope that at least part of my dream was real? I listened to the late afternoon news. Nope, as you were. Some demented dickhead called Trenton has optioned his fifteen fickle minutes of fame and interrupted the boat race. Welcome back to the failed Utopian socialist collective shambles we call Britain.

Sign of the Cross

There is a green hill, far away. And with new planning laws coming soon, it’s destined to become a housing estate. It used to be just a short walk to the green hills; now it’s a chariot ride away, but, Judas had sold his chariot for a bag of magic beans. When his mum found out she was so cross she ruined the hot buns she’d just made and threw them into the yard where they fed five thousand hungry birds, one of which was a white dove (who preferred peas).

Jesus, the Mexican gardener, heard the commotion  and interrupted his Easter break to see what all the fuss was about. He was understandably annoyed because Easter was his favourite holiday; he loved bunny-wabbits and chickadees and chocolate eggs of course – who doesn’t – but he also liked the fact that he could have 16 days off in a row while only taking eight annual leave days.

Such canniness was why, faced with a dilemma, people who drove cars with fish badges on them would ask each other, “What would Jesus do?” Well, what he did was come back to clear up the mess caused by Judas’s mum’s ire. He shouldn’t have bothered. The next door neighbour, Lazarus, who was so lazy he hadn’t been off his arse in weeks was furious, so he’d got out of  bed - a miracle in its own right - and called out the local cops and they’d sent a centurion who was busy nailing down anything that moved.

Well, what with all the mess, ire* and everybody getting cross it’s little wonder it all ended up the way it did. “Whoops!” said the centurion, hastily hiding his hammer.

To commemorate and commiserate, to this day the government reminds us of Jesus’ fate by hammering us with tax… which makes us cross. And as a sign of how cross it makes us, some choose to wear a little crucifix. Or put a fish on their car.

You may find this a surprise but I’m no great a believer in anything beyond what is scientifically verifiable. I don’t go with God, but neither do I believe in witchcraft, aromatherapy, crystals, faith healing, homeogullibility or any other such mountebankery. A Belieber I am not, But if you do have a faith and choose to show it modestly, where’s the issue? 

The government bends over backwards to allow burkas – an appearance both alien and slightly threatening to most native Britons. Nobody has suggested stoning Goths on sight for being ridiculous. Hell you can’t even get arrested for putting your pre-teen daughter in a ‘pornstar’ tee-shirt! We allow all sorts of personal expression – idiocy, anti-social tendencies, even extreme social views – they all have a uniform and accoutrements. We even allow people to alter their appearance, often for sinister or intimidating intent. So what in the name of anything that is holy is all this about?

Isn't it about time, in the words of Malcolm Tucker, to just tell Europe to fuck the fuck off?

Oh and what happened to Jesus? It was but a flesh wound and he was back at work by Monday.


(* mess+ire? See what I did there? Honestly, I'm wasted on you lot! :o) )

On yer bike

Pocket money for chores. That's how it worked. Enough pocket money for a comic and some sweets, provided we did our allotted tasks about the house. Seemed fair enough to me, but I didn't want sweets. My sights were set higher and I would press my nose up against the model shop window, yearning to buy balsa and glue and tissue with which to commit aviation.

So, when I was 12, I lied about my age to get a paper round and then managed to stall for the best part of a year before I could get a legal permit to work part time. Work was - as far as I could see - what distinguished children from adults and I very much wanted to distance myself from association with the feckless youth I had been surrounded by ever since I'd started school. (I never did take to children; I still reckon I was quarried, rather than born.)

 I saved every penny I could of my 75 new-fangled-pee per week wage until I had managed to amass the £25 I needed to take advantage of my parents. Take advantage, that is, of their generous offer to meet me half way on the purchase of a bike. Oh yes, I forgot to to mention, I ran the first year of that round, in all weathers. (It's only in later years I realised my poor mother must have been saving frantically to keep up with me!)

Not long after that I started working weekends at a market garden on the princely sum of 10p per hour. And at sixteen I worked as a general dogsbody in a local hotel on (gasp) £1 per hour and some weeks I managed to put in 25 hours, working part time while starting on those proper 'A' levels. I was working. I was a man. At least that's the way it looked to me. Unless you achieve something great and different your daily work defines you. You'd think more people would want to be good at it.

So it really pisses me right off when I come across stories like the desperation of Janette Harrop of the Old Original pub near Bolton who has been unable to recruit an employable apprentice. If you don't read the whole piece, the headlines tell the story pretty much. Applicants simply can't be arsed, being accustomed to their every whim being catered for as a child. When even a union leader agrees with me (In this article Mary Bousted says, "Far too many children are waited on hand and foot." and believe that their teachers are there to serve them.) there has to be something going badly wrong.

And that's been a common cry from employers for some years now. The infantilisation of Britain, the child-centred culture, from families to school and now into universities and the workplace we (you, that is) have been bending over backwards to shield children from the hard lessons they need to learn in order to play a useful part. We live in a country that is about as far from real austerity as it's possible to get, but the progressive weakening of our (your) moral fibre has created a generation or more that simply cannot get off its arse... for love nor money.

I saw all this coming, years ago, when I began to see BMWs and Mercedes parked out side council houses. When people began to aspire to a lifestyle they could not possibly afford, backed up by an absurd and warped sense of entitlement. Why save for something when you can have it today, declare yourself broke and never pay it back? The never-never became the not-never-ever

But somebody has to pay and if not you, who? Norman Tebbit said "get on yer bike" to an increasingly idle nation back in the 80s.

Today he'd have to make sure your mum got up to pedal it for you.

The theme of the week is incompetence and yes, Britain, not only are you utterly useless, you are not even competent enough to try to hide it.


Blog Plug: For an insider perspective on education you should read this excellent blog by Andrew Old (@oldandrewuk ) http://teachingbattleground.wordpress.com/

That A level.

I suppose you have to be, or know somebody, from The Black Country to understand this joke. It goes like this and it has to be told in the local accent. Ready?

"Ah kid's got wun of them A-levels. In carpentry."

"Aa-ah?"

"Aaa. 'Ee put some shelves up and 'ee ses, "That a' level"."

Ba-da-and furthermore-bing! Plenty more where that came from. (I guess you had to be there... or more precisely, here. For clarification, watch Doreen's Story.)

'A' used to stand for 'Advanced'. That is, an advanced qualification capable of being attained by only the better scholars. Now, however, the 'A' clearly stands for 'Average'... if a large proportion of pupils passes them that's what they are, by definition. (One sort of average at any rate - this would need no explaining to a proper 'A' level maths scholar, but probably 'means' nothing to today's A-plus-double-plus-good clones.)

Beneath the A-level stood a solid tier of achievement known as the 'O' (ordinary) level. And beneath that, for those not destined for the groves of academe, the Certificate of Secondary Education, or CSE... the qualification for the thick kids. Not an issue, by the way; more a badge of honour for those who were going to hit things with big hammers, pull stuff out of the ground, or have babies for Britain.

Well, I was there when they ripped it all up. When the progressive  educationalists (I lump the 'ists' together so you can see the full force of my disdain: psychologist, sociologist, therapist, criminologist, apologist… rapist) ripped the still-beating heart out of Britain's proven, highly esteemed fit-for-purpose, education system. So pernicious were the changes that a future colleague of mine was sent back by his father from London to Guyana in order to undergo a 'proper British education' in a former colony that had yet to ‘benefit’ from ‘progress’.

Because ‘progress’ invariably seem to mean ‘regress’. Progress in transport means that the average speed of traffic in London today is a fraction of what it was a hundred years ago. Progress means that you no longer have to rely on a human being to miscalculate your electricity bill – we have machines now that can fuck it up so much quicker. Progress – in the absence of any accelerated human cranial evolution – means that we replace achievement with the illusion of achievement.

So, Michael Gove’s desire to put the ‘A’ back into A-levels has to be applauded, if not actually completely believed. His heart is undeniably in the right place, but he will be thwarted by the liberal intelligentsia who, despite their lofty, egalitarian posturing have wrought nothing but harm to our entire society.

Oh yes, liberal fuckwits, I’m gunning for you. You, with nothing to lose, have experimented with several generations of Britons and now see the mess you’ve left us in? Bereft of decent public education, available to all, it is you who have left the nation in the hands of the kind of career politicians we have today, scions of the very privileged classes – on both sides of the house – that you sought to crush.

 If Michael Gove truly wants to achieve political immortality he should put all his efforts into the very illiberal and definitely non-intellectually-taxing enterprise of fucking the lot of you right up the arse.

I Spy. With your little eye.

A good week to bury bad news? The government seems to have employed a pack of press hounds intent on bringing every last buried bone back to the surface. The rotting flesh and dripping marrow is making a maggoty mess across front pages, web pages and the red faces of ministers everywhere. Or maybe they've decided that a three-week shitstorm of unparalleled sheer bloody mindlessness is warranted. Either way, right now nothing the government announces plays well and the shit-eating grins of the gurning fools pushed, blinking, into the flashbulb showers is starting to make me feel more than a little nauseous.

The fake fuel crisis continues, now with the  potential to become a real emergency as forecourt stocks have run low. There's plenty of fuel, it's just that most of it is no longer stored at filling stations, but sitting idle on the driveways of people who normally get through three litres a month. I would guess more than a little is also put by, stored in convenient, throwing-sized bottles. Cocktail anybody? The knock-on effect may be people cancelling planned Easter trips, with consequent losses to the tourism industry. It never rains... what am I saying, this is the UK it always rains... except it hasn't and there's a drought looming.

The proposed reform of planning laws has been spun into yet another crony scandal, Ayatollah Galloway hasn't gone away and halfway across the world, Cristina Kirchner makes political capital out of claiming 'back' islands that have never actually belonged to Argentina at a time when our defence spending is at a hopeless and inadequate 2% of GDP and we appear to have a cabinet incapable of agreeing on anything whatosever, let alone going to yet another war.

Then there's this Internet spying business. The whole frigging point of spying - you head-the-balls - is to keep it a bloody secret! The first (and second) rule of spying club is "shut the fuck up!" Did none of you watch Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy? I did and I still don't know who the baddies were! On the other hand, telling us does promote an atmosphere of fear and paranoia; maybe that's the plan? Why not get the kids involved, too?

"Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me."

Meanwhile the dire leadership of the Labour party continues to plod along, promising milk and honey and probably a load of virgins - any desperate thing for the Muslim vote now (thanks George) - all magicked up from the money trees they pillaged, then so assiduously chopped down over their thirteen-year spending spree. Thankfully, for the government, the Mr Ed show has as much chance of galvanising the electorate as Gary Glitter has of making a comeback on CBBC.

So, is the government truly incompetent? Surely not that incompetent? There is so much bad news right now that even this coalition couldn't be responsible, even by accident. By accident there'd still be some good stuff being trumpeted, wouldn't there? Where's the Law of Averages when you need it? Hell, there's not even been a goofy picture of Larry, the Downing Street cat, to raise a smile. Even Gavin Henson's been kicked off The Muppet Show!

So, if it's not an accident, it must be deliberate, in which case, why and why now? Are they taking advantage of the utter feebleness of the current opposition, getting all the crap out of the way in one go, leaving three years to build a comeback? I'm not at all convinced they're that devious, or maybe that's just what they want us to think? Nope, far too complicated. The only other thing I can think of is that behind the uproar, the clamour of pasty tax and petrolgate and "iSpy", something truly dreadful is being covered up.

Or, returning to a happier hypothesis, politicians really are as incompetent as we think they are. Oh, I hope so, because as far as I can see that's the best possible scenario. The only glimmer of light for Britain's future is that we're ruled by buffoons and sooner or later something good will happen and they'll be too stupid to fuck it up.