Once upon a time...

Today's top escapist story amid all the Greeking and Witneying and football racism-ing, is this uplifting report about scary fairy stories in the Daily Mail. It seems today's children are too lily-livered for the robust shut-up-and-go-to-sleep tales of yesteryear, Wimps!

So here's a lovely traditional fairy tale:

Once upon a time there was a poor little straw-haired beggar girl whose bestest friend was a fairy. They played happily all day in the magic grove where the pixies came to sell their dreams and they were as gay as gay can be.

The old woman who lived in a shoe had so many children she didn’t know what to do, although she had found the time to have them colour-coded. But it was alright because the pixies cared for each and every one of them.

The pixies encouraged all the children to play together and let them eat cake. This was no ordinary cake; it was a magic cake because you could eat and eat and eat and at teatime there would still be plenty of cake to go around! The children ate and ate and grew and grew and the old woman was moved into a bigger shoe in a nicer part of the magic grove. What lovely pixies they are, the children cried!

And the children played and the children laughed because all the while, outside the magic grove, they knew that bad people were being punished for not believing in magic pixies.

The bad people had a kind of game called ‘work’. Rumpelstiltskin told riddles and took bets and Rapunzel had to sit in a high-rise sweat shop and grow hair. Then there were the three little pigs, who spent their life building houses only for Mr Wolf to huff and puff and blow them all down again. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker; all of them lived a life beyond the pale, spending their hard lives making things that other people consumed, meaning they had to keep on working to make more things. It sounded horrid!

The children knew about the unhappy people outside because the old woman told tales of when everybody was like that, before the pixies came along and sowed their magic beans in the grove. The magic beans grew qualifications from thin air, which meant that the children would never work again.

One day, despite all the grave warnings, overcome by curiosity and bored of playing all the time, the little golden-locked beggar girl wandered outside the magic grove and found herself in the forest. Soon it started to get dark. The bushes scratched at her legs and the trees tried to snag her hair and she was afraid of the noises in the night, so she pulled up her red riding hood against the cold and hurried on to find shelter.

Little red Goldilocks eventually found a cosy wee cottage with a light on and a fire in the grate. There was nobody home so she slipped inside, looking for food. There were three bowls of porridge on the table; a little one, a big one and a middle-sized one. She scoffed the lot and went looking for a bed. First she tried the little one, but it broke! Then she tried the middle-sized one, but it was too small. Only the biggest one was big enough for her cake-fattened arse.

In the cold hard light of day she was confronted by three bare landlords demanding money for bed and board. When she told them how the magic pixies took care of all that they laughed and set her to work in the kitchen. “But I have qualifications!” she protested. The cook thought for a moment, then gently took away the knife she’d given Goldilocks and replaced it with a broom…

Goldilocks woke up screaming. Outside, the chubby children played around the big taxpayer-funded shoe and ate more cake and the sunshine streamed in through a lace-hole. “No more bedtime stories for me,” thought Goldilocks and waddled out into the sunshine, gay as you like, to live happily ever after

Austerity of Imagination

In the nineteen-forties and fifties, my maternal grandmother spent most of her week cooking, washing and cleaning for eleven kids and an ungrateful husband in a house whose only source of heat was a coal fire with a back boiler. The 'washing machine' was gran, a copper and a mangle. Around the corner, in the nineteen sixties, on the same council estate, my mother used a top-loading, electric washing machine, filled and emptied by hand.

There were two cars in the street, we dreamed of having a telephone and a refrigerator and it never occurred to any of us that Aristotle Onassis didn't deserve his yacht.

'The rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer' is a fallacy. What happens is everybody gets richer, some get proportionately more rich and the majority get ideas above their station. Due to decades of creeping socialism we even have a class of people in this country who do sweet fuck-all yet complain at the prospect of what is being touted as 'austerity'.

I was intending to write about how I'd set about curing poverty, but when I looked at the patient I realised the diagnosis was wrong. There is no such thing as poverty in the UK. With the exception of a few perverse cases of hardship being wrought by person on person or person on self, either directly or by neglect, nobody actually starves to death, or is worked into the grave.

In fact, life in the UK is pretty bloody rosy all round. My parents were brought up during war and post-war rationing. Actual rationing of practically everything. My gran might think she'd gone to heaven. What would she make of near- universal car ownership, mobile phones and the Internet? How would she imagine people would occupy all their free time? By bitching and moaning, she'd have to conclude, because that seems to be all I ever hear.

Oh my, austerity is upon us. Austerity will bring us to our knees. The bodies will pile up in the streets because of all this austerity. Everywhere you look, all you see is austerity. Woe is us, whinge, cringe, wring hands... And yet, as soon as Fabio Tagliatelle quits as England manager all attention turns to seeking out a replacement.

Austerity my arse! That is NOT the preoccupation of a nation on its knees. If you think having fewer self-esteem therapists on the NHS is austere, you need a good kick up the backside. If you think not being able to afford Sky+ is austere you need a slap. And if you think not being able to go on holiday this year is austere you need a few weeks down the salt mines.

And this is not due to 'nasty' Tory policies, in fact it is Socialism and its doctrine of equalising ever-downwards that has robbed you of personal perspective, denied you the joy of self-determination and stripped you of your independence. Open your privileged, "don't-know you're-born" eyes and have a look at what happens in countries whose governments really don't care. Take a peek at Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and all the others on the usual list, which never changes and then tell me we're living in austerity.

Batsby's NHS Reform Bill

Let's sort out the health service once and for all.

It's got to be pretty easy, when you think of it. If you need stitches, or bones gluing back together, or bits taken out, or put back in, or wheels attached, or drugs you can't be trusted to buy and administer yourself, etc, then the NHS will sort that out for you, free of charge, gratis and all that. In, out, bish-bosh, fixed up and back to work like a good 'un.

While in hospital, you'll do as you're told, take the drugs, phys the physio and be nice to the nurses. If you come in pissed-up and fighting, matron will be armed and have carte blanche to take you out. It's okay, they have all the facilities for properly disposing of human waste.

Should you graze your knee, get your head stuck in a saucepan (c.f. The Beano) or have a bit of a headache you can go down the chemist/B&Q and sort yourself out. And if you're feeling a bit 'psychological' that's tough, but normal and you can just pull your socks up and get on with it. Like in the old days.

I think that's everything, isn't it? I don't see what all the fuss was about. Reform Bill? Give me a nifty-fifty (million) and we'll call it quits. Now, I must dash - I have an economy and some foreign affairs to deal with this afternoon.

Down with the Kids

Kids are rubbish! I mean, look at this selection of so-called 'art'. For all the free-form abstraction it's hardly Kandinsky, is it?

If you look closely, the picture at bottom-right reads "Tosh". Quite. Despite the liberal use of neo-non-figurative image-quizzing and a flowing synthesis of geometry-negative interspace chromatics, it's still pretty crap, isn't it? 

Now, I'm not so naive to not realise that a goodly number of drooling parents will be cooing over these very images with expressions of uncontrolled delight. That's because, as parents, they have lost all reason and all perspective - a perspective they will suddenly be shocked back into when those self-same art prodigies turn into spitting, screaming hormonal teenagers. 

Too late, mate; you told them they were artistic! Would you have encouraged them to go into construction if their early DIY efforts were anything like these below? No. Of course not. Because then you would have been responsible for Nick Knowles and shame on you for that.

So why do so many parents engage in brainwashing and hot-housing at a time when kids are, let's be frank about this, pretty bloody useless at just about everything? Let 'em be. And let 'em be kids. This is the argument of an article by by Judith Woods in today's Telegraph, refuting the efficacy of ultra-early years education. I tend to agree.

Play until five. Then learn 'em to read, write, count, and - crucially - learn, from ages 5 to 7. After that work them like fuck until 11. Then examine them, select and stream and specialise and bingo. The ones good at art will do that and the ones good at proper stuff will get jobs and pay for them.

If you try too hard you'll only end up with socially and politically aware little monsters, too scared of making important choices and incapable of holding down a real job, who will disappoint you in more ways than you can imagine. I expect this is exactly where Mr & Mrs Miliband went wrong.

Snow Joke

At the weekend we had a bit of snow. By halfway through Monday it was gone, but still many schools felt the need to close. Heaven forfend we subject the 'ickle' children to the cold reality of winter.

Daniel Radcliffe turned his back on the LibDems and 'defected' to Labour. Naturally, the loss of this intellectual political giant will have grave consequences for fence-sitting voters everywhere. But wait, is this the same young scallywag who decided he was an alcoholic at the age of eleven or something? (I can't be bothered to do the research, but I read something about it somewhere and that's good enough.)

There's outrage in the news about another drunken eleven-year-old being encouraged by his mother, but this comes as  no surprise; with luck and encouragement he'll be capable of becoming a fully-functioning proper alcoholic and will be able to get appropriate disability benefits for life. She's doing him a favour.

In yet another child-related report, growing numbers of five-year-olds are turning up at school in nappies and needing help in basic tasks they should have already mastered.

And George Monbiot in the Guardian is starting to get a mixture of flak and favour for his gleefully childish response to a flawed survey that tells him what he wants hear. Again. (See Saturday's blog.)

From actual children to immature adults, what in hell's name is wrong with the focus of this bloody country? Does nobody realise that children are mere chattels? Moreover, they are mouldable, controllable chattels and we are missing a trick here. Ask not what you can do for your children - ask what your children should be doing for us all.

Here we are, wondering how to save the planet, while simultaneously wasting resources in catering to the urges of ungrateful offspring, who in turn squeeze out more demanding sprogs. We should be utilising this source of natural energy for the good of mankind. Children have been taking the piss for decades and it's high time this child-centric society was turned round. What else are baby and child harnesses made for?

A dozen crawling brats could easily power a domestic-scale treadmill generator. A score of pre-teens could be trained to pull carriages for public transport. With a bit of coordination and judicious use of riding crops I'm pretty sure the London Underground could be powered entirely  by child sweat. And all forms of heavy labour could easily be performed by channelling the excess energy expended in teen angst - suitably 'incentivised' of course.

Pull you little fuckers, pull!

So, to put it all this into perspective:
As a child you are treated as a Socialist in that your collective labour will be harvested for the good of society as a whole. As an adult (over thirty) you'll get to exercise a vote, be in charge (sort of) for a while and adopt the natural Conservatism that you've justly earned and when you retire you can just do whatever the fuck you want. Everybody's happy, the kids are back under the yoke and world order is restored.

Job done. Now, make me king. J