I blame the scapegoats (21 page)

One way to reduce the pressure on kids to
grow up so quickly might be to make sex education more brutally honest about
the reality of the adult sexual experience. 'Sexual intercourse happens between
a man and a woman on Sunday morning after
The
Archers Omnibus.
Foreplay traditionally begins with the
gentleman being more attentive to his wife than he has been all week, fetching
her a second cup of tea and repeatedly sighing, "Well, there's nothing
worth reading in the Sunday papers!" Three minutes after this the lady
says, "Mmm, that was nice!" and remembers that she'd meant to get up
early to deadhead the geraniums.' That should put them off the idea for a
while. Or perhaps special books for children could be used to help educate kids
on the subject. 'Oh dear, Mrs Goggins is very cross with Postman Pat.

He
still hasn't guessed why she's been throwing up in the mornings.' You could
have
Five Go Down to the Family Planning Clinic,
Harry Potter and the Child Support Agency
and
Teletubbies Say Uh-oh!
Or
how about the pop-up
Joy of Sex?
Obviously
after a few years it won't pop up like it used to, but hey - that's life.

6
July 2002

This
government have finally lost touch. They have finally gone native. Somebody
knocks the head off the statue of Lady Thatcher and they somehow try to suggest
that this is a bad thing! Thousands of old lefties completely agree with them
that Paul Kelleher should not have removed the head of Thatcher's statue. He
should have, like, decapitated the original, man! It all could have been
handled so differently. Tony Blair should have come out into Downing Street
looking excited and proud: 'I would like to pass you over to our Minister for
Culture as she has some news I think you might like to hear.'

The minister would then have stepped forward,
trying not to look too smug as she read from the prepared statement: 'Be
pleased to inform Her Majesty, that at approximately 12.00 hours GMT, a lone
anti-capitalist protester entered the Guildhall in London and knocked Mrs
Thatcher's block off! God Save the Queen!'

And
above the cheers of the waiting crowds the excited journalists would have fired
off dozens of questions, only to be chastised by the Prime Minister: 'Just
rejoice at that news! And congratulate Paul Kelleher and Guildhall's security!'

Instead,
the condemnation was universal. 'Politics is about persuading people through
reason,' said Lady Thatcher to the sound of a million jaws dropping around the
country. Of course whacking heads with cricket bats is not something that
should be encouraged, even if it was a technique that Thatcher herself used to
persuade stubborner members of her cabinet from time to time. Foreign
commentators have asked why the assailant was not stopped by security when he
entered the building carrying a cricket bat. They have to understand that, in
England, if someone is in possession of a cricket bat it's just presumed that
they'll never be able to hit their target. Perhaps this new feature should be
incorporated into the English national game; it would certainly liven up
Test
Match Special
a bit: 'And Atherton steps out, swings
his bat high, misses the ball completely but it doesn't matter because he has
knocked the head off the Thatcher statue! Marvellous - just listen to that
applause! But oh dear, the wicketkeeper has managed to catch the head, and
Atherton is out!'

Having failed to remove the head with a
cricket bat, Kelleher employed one of the metal poles used to support the fancy
bit of crimson rope that is supposed to prevent people from getting too close
to the statue. You have to ask questions about the security system in operation
here. Those dark red bits of rope have never been much of a deterrent to a
really determined trespasser. In 1940, when Hitler was looking for the weak
spot in France's famous Maginot Line, he identified the section near the
Ardennes, which consisted of just a few poles linked together with twirly red
rope, as offering the least resistance to the Wehrmacht's tank divisions. If
I'd been the security guard on duty at the Guildhall, I would have just stuck
the head back on with a bit of Araldite and hoped nobody would notice.

'Hang on a minute! What's that crack all
around the neck with gluey stuff dripping out of it?'

'Honestly! It's supposed to be like that, you
philistine. That is the artist's message, about the nature of, er - nothingness.'

'Oh right, yeah.'

It has to be said that as a work of art the
original statue was a pretty vapid effort; if it had been eight inches high it
would have been the sort of bland statuette that middle-class ladies place in
back-lit corner units, on the little shelf above the crystal gondola. Exactly
the sort of bland art that Mrs Thatcher herself might have gone for, in fact.
But now, with the head removed and lying at her feet, it suddenly feels like a
deeply symbolic and ironic statement. The leader who divided British society
now lies in two pieces herself. For a woman who lost her marbles years ago, it
all seems wonderfully appropriate.

Now the empty plinth in the House of Commons
looks set to remain unoccupied for years to come. If they want they can borrow
the old
Spitting Image
puppet
of her that I have in my office and stick that in the empty space. It is a far
better representation, and it might stop all the kids who come for sleepovers
to our house having nightmares.

The
artist is said to be deeply saddened by what has happened. So would you be if
you had to meet up with her all over again for another half dozen sittings. But
if a replacement is to be commissioned, shouldn't it be more in keeping with
the more radical end of the BritArt scene? How about Lady Thatcher's unmade bed
- with empty Glenfiddich bottles and chainmail knickers strewn across the
sheets? Or how about a glass tank containing one of Mrs Thatcher's lungs
pickled in formaldehyde? All right, so it might cause onlookers to recoil with
disgust and nausea. But not as much as having an eight-foot-high realistic
likeness staring down at you.

13
July 2002

This
week the government took decisive action to help Britain's sketch writers and
cartoonists. They published a great big document on the subject of rubbish. The
humorists scratched their heads into the small hours.

'Hmmm,
there's pages and pages of this thing, all about rubbish; there must be an
angle in here somewhere?' 'Nope, beats me.'

The
headline-grabbing idea was that households producing too much waste will have
to start paying. It's a brilliant plan. At the moment we're saying, 'Please
don't drop litter, please take your rubbish home with you.' And now we're
simply adding, 'Oh, and it'll cost you a pound a bag every time you do so.'
What greater incentive could there be to stop people dumping? We've seen what
happens when people have to pay to get rid of their old cars or fridges; and
all because those lazy dustmen somehow try to claim that they can't put a
Nissan Sunny into the back of their cart. Even the Royal Navy has started
simply dumping its battleships. (There's now a great big sticker on HMS
Nottingham
saying 'Police Aware'.)*

*Just as
skiers go 'off piste' and owners of four-wheel drives go 'off road', this week
the captain of HMS
Nottingham
went 'off sea'.

Fortunately, in this
country all the appropriate spaces for fly tipping are very clearly marked;
they have a big sign saying 'No Fly Tipping'. There's something about certain
stretches of brick wall that compels people to think, 'You know what that spot
really needs? A wet mattress and a broken kitchen unit - yup, that would really
finish it off.'

'Super idea - and maybe some tins of hardened
paint arranged around the edges?'

Something has to be done about all the
rubbish produced in this country, other than putting it out on Sky One. Britain
has one of the worst waste problems in Europe; we've all seen the ugly pictures
of hundreds of tonnes of rubbish spread everywhere, bin liners split open as
mangy looking seagulls pick over the stinking contents. Yes, that's what
happens to the front garden when the dustmen don't get a Christmas tip. If the
refuse does eventually get collected, it ends up in one of Britain's 1400
landfill sites (except for all the empty coke cans which go in my hedge).
Britain has more landfill sites than most countries because of the number of
mysterious holes in the ground located close to something once apparently known
as 'the British Coal Industry'. So that's why Thatcher closed all the mines:
she needed somewhere to put all of Denis's empties. It was a brilliant
political scam: 'All right, Arthur Scargill, you can re-open all the coal mines
if you want, but you'll have to get all the old disposable nappies out first.'

To
cut down on the amount of rubbish that we bury, we're going to have to recycle
more. It's suggested that people should recycle their vegetable waste by having
a compost heap. Fine for some households, but if you're a single parent on the
thirteenth floor of a high-rise block, you're unlikely to be worrying about
whether the avocado skins would make good compost for the begonias. Paper is
another obvious area where recycling should be encouraged. In Britain we throw
away millions of tonnes of waste paper every day, and that's just the pizza
leaflets. Where I live in Lambeth there is a scheme which involves putting all
your newspapers outside your front gate for recycling. Countless hours are
wasted every Monday night as couples anxiously argue over which publication
would look best on top of the crate before it's put out for all to see.

'You can't just leave
Hello!
magazine on top. What will the neighbours think?'

'But
I only put it there to cover up that Outsize Underwear catalogue we got through
the post.'
''What Computer?'
'Too
nerdy.'
'Daily Mail!’
'God
forbid!'

'Look, hang on, the newsagent's still open.
I'll pop down and get a copy of
Literary Review -
we
can stick that on top.'

And then an hour later an old man in a grubby
mac walks past and casually throws a copy of
Asian
Babes
on top of the pile and the whole street has
you marked down as a pervert for ever more. As well as publicly displaying your
choice of reading material, you are also forced to advertise your weekly
alcohol consumption when you put out the empty wine bottles. All I'm saying is
that that Catholic priest in our road must do an awful lot of Holy Communions
at home.

In future, anything that is not recycled will
be weighed by the dustmen and a levy will be charged on particularly heavy
wheelie bins. This will have people sneaking bags of rubbish into each other's
bins under cover of darkness; at three in the morning the bedroom window will
go up, followed by shouts of 'Oi, neighbour, that's
our
bloody wheelie bin you're loading up there!'

'Oh sorry, Cherie, it's so hard to see in the
dark. Anyway it's not my fault - I've got tonnes and tonnes of useless scrap
paper to get rid of. It's that huge report on rubbish from your husband.'

See,
even jokes can be recycled.

20
July 2002

The
British army is going all hi-tech. Now when you phone them up you get a
disjointed digital recording saying, 'Thank you for phoning the Ministry of
Defence. If you wish to declare war on the United Kingdom, please press one. If
you are the American President and require British forces to join your own to
give the spurious impression of international co-operation, please press two.
If you wish to register a complaint about the massacre of innocent civilians,
press three or hold for an operator.' In which case you have to listen to
Vivaldi for thirty years until someone's finally prepared to listen.

This week it was announced that British
service personnel are to be armed with all the latest micro-chip technology to
assist them in the war against terrorism. With so much of today's defence
budget being spent on computerized equipment, they needed that extra
£3.5
billion to pay for the printer cartridges. Modelling the
'soldier of the future' outfit for the BBC News was an embarrassed-looking
squaddie weighed down by countless electrical gadgets strapped all over his
body, while his face seemed to say, 'I haven't the faintest bloody idea how any
of this stuff works.' There were satellite communicators, computerized weapons,
an integrated monitor screen just above his eyeline; all in standard army
camouflage colours, making the soldier impossible to pick out until the moment
his mobile phone suddenly went off, playing
The
Dam Busters
theme at full volume.