I blame the scapegoats (19 page)

However,
the idea of taking child benefit away from the parents of consistent truants is
not acceptable. You can take parents to court and the judge may choose to fine
them. But child benefit is not a special treat for best-behaved parents, it is
a hard-fought-for right for all. 'These parents are living in poverty and have
lost control of their children.' 'Okay, well, the solution must be to make them
poorer!'

Of
course it's not always that easy to track down the kids who are playing truant.
One effective method is for teachers to ring the phone numbers of their stolen
mobiles and then when someone answers they say, 'Why aren't you in class
today?' Some excuses are better than others:

'Why isn't your fourteen-year-old daughter in
school this morning?'

'Because she's giving
birth to twins.'

'Oh, I see. What
about her little brother?'

'Well, someone had to
drive her to the hospital.'

Most
truancy actually takes place with the parent's permission. By 'truancy' we are
obviously only referring to working-class children being off school - it is an
entirely different matter if middle-class parents are taking their kids out
during term time, because that was the only week the villa in Tuscany was
available: 'Oh yes, I mean, think of the educational value little Henry will
get from seeing the architecture in Florence and Pisa.'

'Quite, and last year he learnt several
Italian words, like, erm, "pizza"

Local
authorities are now employing truancy officers to question parents who are out
and about with their kids during school hours. The next stage will be to patrol
Legoland and Disneyland Paris, where they'll catch thousands at a time. They'll
hide inside the Mickey Mouse costume and just when Mum and Dad think a giant
cartoon character is hugging their kids, they'll suddenly realize Mickey is
picking them up and slinging them in the back of a police van.

'What's this ride
called?'

'Back to school-land.
Now shut up.'

I
June 2002

The
Queen has been in a fantastic mood this week. Her Golden Jubilee appears to
have prompted an enormous surge in patriotism, with pubs and cafes all decked
out with the flag of St George.

'But why do all these people celebrating the
Jubilee have "Come On England!" all over their white vans?' she asked
her advisers.

'Er, well, Ma'am, they are urging the rest of
England to "come on" and celebrate Your Majesty's Jubilee . . .'

'Oh, I see. But why
does it say "Owen For Ever"? What's Owen?'

'Ah, that, well, yes, er, that's an
acronym, Ma'am
...
It stands for,
erm, "Onwards With Elizabeth's Nation" . . . yes, that works . . .'

'Well, I must say one hasn't seen such an
outpouring of national pride since you pointed out that everyone was
celebrating my fortieth birthday back in nineteen sixty-six!'

As
a simple test of how the English people channel their patriotism, support for
the national football team has totally eclipsed any interest in the Queen's
Golden Jubilee. It's a complete walkover: England Flags 5, Union Jacks 1. (Of
course all the flags were actually made in China, but that's another matter.)
If the Queen had broken her lower metatarsal two months ago, it's hard to
imagine the nation fretting quite so much as to whether she'd have been fit to
do royal walkabouts in time for the Jubilee bank holiday. 'And the news from
the Buck House dressing room is that the Queen is looking fifty-fifty for the
royal balcony waving on June the third. The physio laureate has said he doesn't
want to push her too fast; some of those red carpets can be pretty
treacherous.'

It seems logical that the only way for the
royal family to increase its popularity would be to adopt some of the trappings
of our national sport. Football has the advantage of constant television
exposure, analysis from a panel of experts, post-match interviews - these are
all things that Buckingham Palace needs to think about if they want to force
themselves back to the centre of the nation's heart. So after a royal
tree-planting is replayed for the third time in slow motion, we'll cut straight
to the dressing room where John Motson is waiting to talk to a red-faced Prince
Charles, as other exuberant royals run behind him, ruffling his sweat-soaked
hair.

'So, Charles - a very successful
tree-planting there . . . Congratulations!'

'Well, yeah, I didn't know much about it to
be honest. The mayor picked up the shovel on my left, he passed it to me, inch
perfect like, and I suddenly saw the base of the tree at my feet and I just
buried it!'

The Duke of York, as President of the FA, is
currently the only royal directly connected with the beautiful game and last
week flew out for the opening ceremony. Apparently there was a terrible delay
at the airport when Andrew's name came up on the computer as someone who had a
history of travelling abroad with other English lads and getting involved in
violence. 'Yes, that was the Falklands War, it doesn't count,' he said as he
was chucked in the cells with all the tattooed Chelsea fans. Apparently the
foul language and obscene singsongs were quite shocking, but the fans soon got
used to it.

Andrew's sister remains the only royal to
have represented her country at the highest level on the sports field. In 1972
Princess Anne made the Olympic team for the sport of Poncing Around on a Horse.
(The British selectors went on to get the gold medal for sycophantic toadying.)
Her Royal Highness jumped all the fences as well as can be expected considering
she had a police bodyguard sharing her saddle at all times. Anne's appearance
was notable for the bizarre fact that she was the only competitor at the entire
games who was not forced to undergo a sex test. The authorities carefully read
through
Debrett's Etiquette and Modern Manners
and
there was absolutely no guidance whatsoever as to how one might tackle the
tricky subject of whether a royal princess is a geezer or not. 'The thing is,
Your Royal Highness, we do need to be one hundred per cent sure that you are
not endowed with the old meat and two veg, as it were, so if you could just
quickly lower the old jodhpurs for us, Ma'am, we'll be on our way.' A request
like this could ruin your chances of being invited to a garden party at
Buckingham Palace.

But not until one of the royals actually
represents their country in Britain's favourite sport will they be able to
claim some sort of stake in their subjects' football-inspired patriotism. Under
FIFA rules the Queen could still qualify for this World Cup. Imagine the drama:
England in the World Cup Final and Her Majesty in goal for the penalty
shoot-out. It's just a shame she'd have to play for the Germans.

8
June 2002

When
a great public building becomes vacant, the planning people must sit around for
hours and hours thinking what on earth it could possibly be used for. 'I don't
know, maybe this is a bit crazy, and shoot me down if I'm way off beam here,
but how about - luxury flats?'

A
stunned silence falls around the room at the incredible originality of this
idea, the sheer audacity of such lateral thinking.

'What, you mean convert an old Victorian
building originally intended for public use into small luxury domestic units to
sell to young professionals? It couldn't be done, could it?'

'No, who in their right mind would pay two
hundred and fifty K for a two-bedroom converted classroom?'

The price of property has got so ridiculous
that you can't even get a rabbit hutch for under £100,000 these days. When
rabbits have dinner parties, it's all they talk about.

'My owners looked at a two-bedroom hutch in
Islington; it was a hundred and fifty K and that was without straw'

'I know, it's ridiculous; we were hoping to
start a family on Wednesday but we're going to have to wait until the weekend
at least.'

Many
central London pets are now having to rent one-room hutches way out in the
Thames Estuary and then commute in every morning on the District Line. And once
those hamsters start running the wrong way up the down escalator you just can't
get them off it.

Figures released this week show the biggest
leap in dinner-party conversations about house prices for five years.
Discussions about the cost of a three-bedroom semi were up 5 per cent on last
year, while smug anecdotes about how little couples paid for their own home a
few years back are up a massive 17 per cent.

'My family only paid a pound for this place
and now it's worth a hundred million.'

'Yes, but you are the
Queen, Ma'am.'

In fact it had all started to go wrong way
before that, right back when
Homo sapiens
started
to shelter in caves. The supply of caverns was limited and prices started to
rocket. Neanderthal estate agents would show prospective buyers around, trying
to talk up the cave's best points.

'What about heating;
what's that like?'

'I know it feels a little chilly at the
moment but that's because we're in the middle of an ice age. But it's not a
smoke-free zone or anything, so you'd be able to have a real fire just as soon
as man discovers it.'

'Great! And the current occupier will
definitely move out on completion, will he?'

'What, the sabre-toothed tiger? Um,
definitely, yup, no problem there; just tell him you're the new cave-owner and
he'll be only too happy to move on, I'm sure . . .'

Then primitive hunter-gatherers turned to
agriculture and built the first farmhouses, soon adding a couple of spare rooms
to let out for bed and breakfast. In those days you would work for a week or so
and then you'd have your house. Obviously we've come a long way since then,
except that now we have to work for twenty-five years before we own our homes
outright. The reason that so many first-time buyers are struggling to get into
the game of snakes and property ladders is not so much the price of property,
but the exorbitant profits made by the mortgage companies. Imagine if a
dodgy-looking bloke in a sheepskin coat with two hard men lurking behind him
knocked on your door and offered you a loan.

'I'll lend you a hundred grand. You pay me
back one hundred and seventy grand. But don't forget to pay, because we'd hate
to see you lose your house, wouldn't we, boys?'

'Well, it's a big
profit, but I suppose you have to cover your expenses.'

'Ah yes, the survey fee, that's another five
hundred pounds you owe us.'

'Oh well, I suppose
you've got all your paperwork . . .' 'Good point, that's another grand for our
"arrangement fee".' 'Blimey, well, I suppose you have to think of the
risks . . .' 'Which is why you'll also be taking out my insurance policy - tell
him, Ron . . .'

You'd rightly think they were con men. But
those are exactly the sort of mortgage figures you'd be quoted by the banks and
building societies today. At least when Brazilian bandits drug you and steal
one of your kidneys they don't charge you for the operation.

The spiralling property market is a symptom
of the widening gap between rich and poor. With too many people earning more
than they can possibly spend, they are buying flats to let out or little
weekend cottages in Gloucestershire. Now when it's closing time on Friday night
in the pubs of Kensington, the landlord shouts, 'Come on, haven't you got
second homes to go to?' We have a property crisis because the rich are too
rich. But you can't blame them for wanting to get out of the inner cities at
the weekend. I mean, London can be so ghastly sometimes, what with all those
homeless people on the streets and everything . . .

In-flight entertainment

14
June 2002

It's
no wonder that ITV Digital couldn't get anyone to pay for their various
satellite channels. Not when you can watch live footage from US spy planes for
free. This week it was revealed that for the past six months it's been possible
to watch transmissions from American spy planes with an ordinary satellite
dish. What would normally require a secret video link was being broadcast
unencrypted across the world via a commercial TV satellite, with a live
connection to the internet just in case one or two terrorists had failed to
catch the current US troop movements on their telly.