Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian (22 page)

Kate McCann accused Acorah of being a self-publicist. At least, that’s what it says on the cover of her new book. The McCanns say they’re not going to listen to a deluded old bloke who claims to speak to the dead, which should save them another trip to the pope. Acorah wanted to spare the McCanns further suffering by not pointing out how much cheaper it is to fly to Portugal when you’re not tied to school-holiday dates.

The Metropolitan Police like to think Maddie is still alive, because they get a better tan in Portugal without having to wear those stifling crime-scene overalls. The police have been talking to Acorah as they can’t rule out any lead, especially one presented by someone who looks like a homicidal nonce. When he’s possessed he looks lost and confused. If you want the experience of seeing his show, just throw £50 in a shredder and then ask your dad how to work the washing machine.

Education is a key battleground because in order to function, society doesn’t need you to be just a bit stupid. No, for you to subsidise a welfare state for billionaires you’re going to need to be a real slack-faced fuckpuzzle. You’ll have to be the sort of person who, while having both their basic liberties and their assets taken from them, would choose to focus on a thing a footballer did at a thing. Society needs you to be able to sit through a talent show that will be won by an animal. It needs you to be stupid enough to wave a little plastic flag at some cunts on a golden barge while your kid gets his legs blown off to secure an oil executive’s bonus.

Maybe this need for abject cluelessness is why thousands of secondary-school pupils are now being taught by teachers who don’t possess degrees in the subject they teach. Most teenagers don’t need a teacher with a degree. What they really look for is a responsible grown-up who, over time, they can make have a complete mental breakdown. We shouldn’t worry too much about degrees. Teaching is a vocation for most people. Teachers want to give something back, like all the misery and hate that they suffered at school.

Michael Gove wants to introduce performance-related pay in schools. That’s wrong. Of course everyone hates PE teachers but we can’t just let them starve. I say leave teachers alone as they have enough problems as it is. Traffic can be a nightmare at half three.

Children will be made to read fake words like ‘terg’, ‘fape’ and ‘ulf’ in an effort to gauge their reading levels. The bogus words will be mixed up with real words in tests. It shows how little the examiners know about popular culture, as these words are already common in text speak. Only today I sent a text hoping Danny Dyer would be viciously faped with a foot-long terg until his ulf snapped, bled and withered.

Carol Vorderman’s spoken out about the importance of children’s numeracy. Quite right, Carol. Otherwise they might not possess the skills to avoid having the wool pulled over their eyes by loan-consolidation outfits selling poor-quality options at a high rate of interest.

An education system should be all about the love of learning. If you can successfully crush that, you’ve got yourself a compliant workforce. The problem with school is that it teaches you a lot of useless stuff. For example, since I’ve been an adult I’ve never once had to fend off a randy priest. We’ve been sliding down the education results table too long. Not like in my day, when the only thing sliding down the table was Mr Harris, lycra pants stretched to structural limits, while we reluctantly provided an accompaniment with ‘Je t’aime’ played on a comb and paper.

Michael Gove also announced a ‘free school’ to be staffed by ex-army teachers. Nick Clegg begged Gove to only bring free schools into deprived areas. For Gove, that applies to anywhere that pasteurises its goats’ cheese.

Gove’s always appalled me. He’s an education secretary with every quality you would hope schools would educate out of children: priggishness, ignorance and a lack of concern for other people. Even his physical appearance is something that schools usually eradicate through bullying. You can’t swan around a comprehensive looking like a boggly-eyed novelty toy that when you throw it hard enough at a window sticks by its lips. You’ll be – justifiably – beaten to death. If he’d gone to my school Gove would either have had to morph his body into an entirely different shape or have his sodomised corpse discovered crammed behind a boiler in a storeroom.

But getting more ex-soldiers into teaching is a great idea. Especially now all schools are obliged have disabled access. Sounds to me like it’s a discount way of training up reserve troops. Child armies are good at sneaking up on the enemy, who assume they’re adults that are just still in the distance. One thing’s for sure. A kid’s only going to push an ex-soldier too far the once! They won’t want a second scene with him sobbing on the floor trying to fight the flashbacks of his mates burning in an upside-down Land Rover.

Studies show that returning soldiers take up to ten years to feel safe, not under attack and revert back to thinking that killing is wrong. I’m just not sure the middle of an urban secondary school is the place to undergo this therapy. At least kids can’t say geography is boring if they’re being taught by an overweight drunken man with a knife in his sock, having flashbacks whenever he discusses the mountain range where he killed three men with a radio aerial. Do teenagers need to be taught by alcoholic security guards? Surely they get enough of that at home.

A red-headed schoolboy was told he has to be taught in isolation – because he’s being bullied by classmates for being ginger. They’re also giving him a thirty-second head start at home time to make it sporting. The teachers have taught a very powerful lesson – it’s not OK to be born different.

A ten-year-old boy started back at school as a girl. Now, first of all, if you’re an adult and want to dress as the opposite sex or get a sex change, I’m all for it – it’s all part of life’s great parade. I just wonder, though . . . if a ten-year-old is not allowed to get a tattoo, a tongue piercing and is considered too young for make-up, should they be allowed to get a vagina? The boy and his mother have been photographed from behind and look exactly the same. It’s not been reported whether she has any daughters. But I think we can guess, can’t we?

Nobody makes major life decisions based on what they did at primary school. Otherwise the world would be full of virtuoso recorder players. If we’re going to give ten-year-olds surgery to turn them into the person they’re convinced they should be we’d better stock up on injections of radioactive spider bites.

Males are five times more likely to want gender reassignment than females. This is because men’s clothes are shit. The mother said her son started showing signs of wanting to be a girl at two and a half. How can you say a two-and-a-half-year-old shows female tendencies? I’ve a four-year-old boy and as far as I remember a couple of years ago he was pretty much just screaming that he hated me. So, yeah, behaving like every woman I’ve ever known.

I’m sure this was a hard decision for the family. I’m just not sure that the thing you are convinced of at ten should mean an irreversible life decision. I was 100 per cent convinced at ten that if I didn’t switch my light on and off twice at night my mother would die. We didn’t then take the next step of wiring my light switch up to her pacemaker. If British schoolchildren are going to be allowed to go to school dressed as the person they believe they are inside, I expect to see a lot of kids blacking up at the start of next term.

Experts say that sex-education lessons should start in nursery school. Well, there’s at least one teacher in the UK who thinks they should begin just as the ferry leaves British waters.

Speaking of holidays, schools are to enforce fines if your kid misses lessons because of holidays. Like many parents I don’t feel I’ve a choice. Without someone working those allotments the cabbages would be ruined while his mum and I are in Florida.

In a poor choice of phrase, David Cameron said he’s planning a big shake-up of childcare. I, too, worry about the high cost of childcare. In fact, sometimes I just can’t see how he’s ever going to pay it all back. Of course, there’s a list of babysitters prepared to work well below the market rate. Unfortunately, it’s the sex offenders’ register.

We’re still paying the most in Europe for childcare. Not a problem for me; I relish caring for a young child. Each day starts with the swings and a play in the sandpit. Then after a couple of hours I just head home, slip him another half a tramadol as he rouses, then it’s back to the park.

Grandparents do the equivalent of £7 million of babysitting. Let’s not forget pensioners often have exactly the right skills to look after toddlers, as many are going deaf. One thing I can be sure of when I leave my boy with my mum is that he’s not going to run off. The horizontal arms of her cruciform gravestone means there’s no way he can slide his leash off the top.

• • •

Britain is a cosy, polite carve-up, but for anyone outside that gentlemen’s club things are pretty bleak. Half a million families live in rented houses so damp it affects their health. It happened to me as a student. I ended up in hospital, as it turned out the mushrooms were poisonous.

Child poverty in the UK will soar by 2015. At least we won’t have the unhappiest kids in Europe; these will be the ones whose toys have been shipped to us following a UN appeal. But there’s a silver lining to every cloud – the poorer your childhood, the better sob story you’ll have on the twenty-four-hour rolling death match that is
X Factor 2015
. The Tories say they don’t want to trap families on benefits, so they’re trapping them in poverty. The Tories also say they’re cutting benefits to encourage people to get jobs, which, in the current climate, is like saying, ‘We’re cutting medicine to encourage you to become immortal.’ Our current definition of poverty is in comparison to the expected standard of living in the UK. The Tories want to compare it globally, so we won’t count a child as poor until they’re floating to school on a bloated cow’s carcass.

The recession means parents are no longer splashing out on expensive toys – because their children have been taken into care. I refused to dress up as Santa for my son’s nursery just in case he recognised me – because of the white beard I wear to wake him every night at 3 a.m. and whisper, ‘Boy! You’ve been asleep for FIFTY YEARS!!’

A survey revealed that most kids prefer the boxes their presents come in to the presents themselves. True for my boy. Although it could be my fault for wrapping that puppy up so far in advance. He loved that box. He crawled under it and wouldn’t come out for three days.

New research shows that two in five parents won’t let their children have second-hand clothes. That’s ridiculous. Wearing hand-me-downs taught me a valuable lesson. If you get bullied, never run. Actually, it was damn near impossible in those heels.

Charities condemned a babygrow that had the slogan ‘They shake me.’ It’s one of several items of clothing making light of child abuse, the most common being those with the Nike symbol on them.

In the United States a six-year-old was handcuffed and charged after having a tantrum at school. Quite right, it’s the only way kids will learn. Either put your shoes on quickly or you’re getting kettled. If our kids knew we owned a Taser they might put a bit more effort into those awful glitter and dried-pasta collages they turn up with. ‘Daddy, it’s a horse!’ ZAP! ‘Not good enough, baby. Not good enough.’

Should we be allowed to punish kids more severely? I don’t know. Surely if it’s legal it’ll take away the thrill. Call me an optimist but I don’t think bad classroom behaviour today means these kids will be unruly adults tomorrow. Their Chinese overlords will be able to send a few volts through their compliance caps or simply withhold their radiation meds.

Figures recently released revealed that in the last five years 1,200 kids aged seven and under have been permanently excluded. Of course, it’s very easy to stop a six-year-old coming back to school. Just take him to the next street, spin him round a few times, then run away. But it’s a problem that so many kids leave school with a lack of moral guidance and a reading age of eleven. Especially as the police aren’t going to be recruiting any time soon. Could riots be avoided if cuts lead to fewer police? Maybe. I suppose there’d be less to get the ball rolling by shooting at the public.

Labour’s David Lammy said that if parents could smack their kids the riots would never have happened. I confess, after that summer’s troubles I lost control and hit my boy. I felt bad about it, but I did distinctly tell him to get size 44 Nikes. A lot of parents are worried that if they smack their kids social services will spring into action and several years later will come knocking on the door of their previous address. New research claims that hitting children gives them cancer in later life. A dilemma for me, as it’s the only way I can get mine to hand over his fags.

Another study revealed that one in four kids comes close to death before the age of sixteen. The fact is you can’t wrap your kids up in cotton wool, as before long they’ll only get rounded up by some sick paedo with a Border collie. Don’t overprotect kids. You put them in a big hamster ball and what happens? One day they suffocate because a child molester sticks his cock in the air hole.

A school banned triangular flapjacks for being too dangerous. Flapjacks are very dangerous to teens, as the roughage may finally force five years worth of fried chicken through their colons in one go.

Flapjacks being dangerous is great news, as the child soldiers of Sierra Leone can now make the weapons required to murder their own families at an after-school club. Presumably the kid who works out that you can break a square flapjack in half to make two triangular ones gets an A level and free rein of the Broadmoor kitchens.

Flapjacks have already been banned from Scottish schools for years, after it was discovered the golden liquid in the mixture wasn’t actually heroin – and anyway the points always got stuck in the basket of the deep fryer.

Jamie Oliver slagged off Michael Gove for delaying improvements to school dinners. I used to get free school lunches. It was one of the many perks of bullying. The problem is that parents will still turn up at breaks with unhealthy snacks. My mum did. She was discreet, though, dressing as a cow and filling a marigold glove with syrup, before rearing up and wedging the finger teats through the railings.