Fresher`s week

Pokemon zodiac via Arkeis

On long road journeys, only two rules apply when driving along in the family car with the squeaking breaks. Firstly, anyone who asks “are we there yet?” is immediately ejected and made to walk and secondly; the driver decides on the CD or radio station. Thus, on the long Saturday morning drive to deliver the Neanderthal that formerly occupied an upstairs room to his seat of tertiary learning; the airways were given over to Richard Coles and Saturday Live courtesy of BBC Radio 4. The people not driving retreated to their personal audio devices only noticeable during the reassuring moment of silence before the news when the sibilant hissing was loud enough to cause a olive grove full of cicadas to drop down dead from the trees.

George…don`t do that

Image via Stefan Rousseau

The genius of Joyce Grenfell`s Nursery School monologue is that what George is actually doing is left to our sordid imaginations. Decades on, and with the quaint and gentle satire of black and white television and the Home Service a distant memory, what George is actually doing requires no subtle interpretation.

On a recent jaunt to China, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has indicated exactly how his long term economic plan actually works. Like some low-life addicted to crack cocaine, he steals stuff that he does not own to flog it off at a knock down price to unscrupulous dealers simply to fund his self-destructive habit.

Aylan and Hadeel

Image via Youth Against Settlements

If an image of a dead child washed up on a Mediterranean beach conveys the consequences of being a refugee, then an image of a young woman about to be shot dead conveys the reasons for becoming a refugee. The image of a lifeless Aylan Kurdi face down in the surf temporarily shocked the world into an all too brief moment of compassion now almost forgotten; the image of Hadeel al-Hashlamun, an 18-year old Palestinian student will be ignored in the interests Middle Eastern security and forgotten in the interests of western economic pragmatism.

Very British ad hominem

Playing the man

Within the occult dark arts coven of British politics, it is evidentially clear that former MP and novelist Chris Mullin is a witch and should be immediately conveyed to the nearest village pond to be dunked in order to ascertain if he floats or sinks. In the early years of the first Thatcher government, the then Labour MP for Sunderland South and shameless supporter of the late Tony Benn concocted a fanciful yet amusing piece of fiction entitled “A Very British Coup”. The plot of this far-fetched political fantasy involves a left-wing working class Labour MP by the name of Harry Perkins unexpectedly becoming a British Prime Minister.

Four claws

A retirement do at an Estate Agents

Observers already missing the knockabout slapstick farce of the Labour leadership campaign can find solace in the oeuvre of Richard and Karen Carpenter and in the opus magna of Bachman-Turner Overdrive. In terms of puerile name-calling “We`ve Only Just Begun” and if you enjoy hysterical mud-slinging then “You Ain`t Seen Nothing Yet.” After a seemingly endless four months of screaming “unity is strength” at each other, it appears that there are only two categories of Labour Party member. Astonishingly, after all these years, it turns out that the Labour movement is entirely populated by either Trotskyites or Tories.