Christmas bores
‘Did you know? Jesus was actually born in September.’
A festive lunch isn’t complete without this historical footnote being aired by the family nerd. Obviously Baby Jesus wasn’t born in December when it’s pretty nippy in the Holy Land and no sane person would set off by donkey to fill in a census form. But the month of September is pleasantly balmy, and everyone is free to travel because the harvest has been gathered. So, yes, Joseph and his pregnant wife ventured forth on the family donkey to stay in Bethlehem where a room had been booked at their favourite inn. But wait. A donkey? An inn? These were significant luxuries in Roman times. And the arrival of friends with costly gifts, including gold, suggests a certain affluence. Let’s face it, the Christs were loaded. The notion that Jesus belonged to the underclass has been invented to generate sympathy – like the idea that Meghan called her daughter Lilibet as a mark of respect for the Queen.
Net zero is like giving up cigarettes by getting your kids to smoke them for you
Meghan and Harry
Frustrated recluses Meghan and Harry have emerged from hiding to collect an award for fighting racism in the royal family. And their Netflix bosses have forced the bashful pair to break their silence and deliver a round of interviews about their gripping documentary series. When, oh when, will the world give this modest couple the privacy they crave?
The latest bombshell: they have no private plane. Yes, that’s right. The saviours of the planet lack their own office-in-the-sky and are experiencing ‘jet poverty,’ as it’s called at Davos. They can cadge a ride with friends like Elton John and George Clooney but their travel plans have to coincide with their globe-trotting benefactors. It’s time the British public clubbed together and bought the royal exiles a Cirrhus Vision SF50 (top speed 556 km/hr), which retails at three million bucks. Operating costs are extra but it won’t be needed for long. Just seven years. Experts tell us that unstoppable climate change will wipe out all mammal species in 2030, and no later (although certain observers expect this deadline to slip a little).
Oxford council
‘Bring back lockdown’ is the second most unpopular phrase in Westminster (after ‘bring back Liz’). Yet lockdown nostalgia has descended on Oxford council whose leaders are fighting climate change by turning their suburbs into an open prison. The new rules decree that cars are confined to one of six neighbourhoods and anyone caught driving without a digital passport gets instantly slapped with a fine by a supersmart spy-camera. The new utopia has been hailed as the ‘15-minute city’ – which is the amount of time it takes a teenager to hack into the council’s computer and wangle a life-long exemption for his parents.
Yoga
Christmas is an especially trying time for yoga addicts. While everyone else is quaffing Prosecco and gorging on roast turkey, the victims of yoga feel obliged to perform their slow-motion pole-dancing moves on rush-mats woven by endangered Amazonian tribeswomen. Even worse, they have to maintain the fiction that their supine writhings have the power to heal their spirits and nurture their bodies. But is this true? You’ll notice that most yoga-holics employ a female cleaner who manages to get by without yoga – for obvious reasons. Nipping around a house with a Hoover and a damp cloth involves the same array of bending, leaning and flexing movements as a 30-minute yoga session. Let’s scrap yoga and just tidy up our homes.
George Osborne’s wilderness years
The ex-chancellor’s latest career-move is to run the world’s largest lost property office which is known to locals as the British Museum. Word is that he plans to return the shoplifted Elgin Marbles to Athens. This is a grave error, as Osborne the macro-economist knows, because Greece and its economy were snapped by German bankers during the credit crunch. Handing the marbles back to their rightful owners means sending them to Berlin.
Waiting lists
Amazingly, some supporters of the NHS still believe in these mythical abstractions. Waiting lists are an existential con-trick, like watching a Beckett play. You hang around for ages, half-stupefied with anxiety, while your life trickles away and in the end nothing happens. Which is not surprising. Our brave health workers can’t treat patients because they never get a spare moment during their punishing shifts on the front-line. The average nurse spends her days practising dance manoeuvres in the corridor, or giving interviews to Channel 4 about ‘the winter crisis’.
Cuts
Austerity experts always avoid the uncomfortable truth that buying grub is less important than funding a family’s digital needs. A smartphone and a laptop each. A superfast broadband connection. A handful of streaming services and a wide-screen TV for communal viewing with Cokes and snacks all round. Old-fashioned types still splash out on a BBC licence as well, believe it or not. So where will the cuts fall? Some families have had to downgrade their premium Netflix package to ‘basic with adverts – £4.99 a month.’ How hollow, pinched and Dickensian that phrase sounds, ‘basic with adverts.’ Does it not claw and tear at the heart-strings? Poverty campaigners say the scars inflicted by ‘basic with adverts’ may never be healed.
Net zero
What a wheeze. Instead of burning British coal in Britain we’re paying China to burn Chinese coal over there – to make us feel smug. Yet the fumes pollute the atmosphere that we all breathe. Net zero is like giving up cigarettes by getting your kids to smoke them for you.
NHS reform
The NHS exists to treat patients from all over the world provided they attend a UK hospital. What a thoughtless and uncaring attitude. The NHS should adopt the policy of Medecins Sans Frontieres and despatch teams of doctors across the globe to administer treatment in local clinics. Forcing vulnerable patients to fly to Heathrow and check into a west London hospital is cruel and inhumane. It may even be torture.
Patreon
Please Elon, buy Patreon and scrap it. For the sake of our collective sanity. It’s awful having to read all those desperate pleas for attention from penniless scribblers. ‘Support me on Patreon and get an exclusive weekly newsletter.’ No thanks. How about, ‘support yourself in Greggs and get an exclusive weekly paycheque.’
David Attenborough
The BBC’s favourite eco-bore is doubtless preparing his next prime-time special about psychotically violent animals. Expect distressing scenes of polar bears eating baby seals, crocodiles devouring flamingo chicks, and vultures squabbling over sacks of UN lentils. All the action is filmed exactly as it happened, according to the BBC, and critics are not permitted to suggest that the footage has been doctored in any way. Which is perfectly true. Everyone knows that when a lioness chases a gazelle there’s a full orchestra present to add exciting music.
Rocketeering
There was a time when beery middle-aged men dressed up in breeches, bells and ribbons and performed rustic dances on village greens. Zero gravity has become the new arena for today’s Morris men. Outer orbit is crowded with spaceships full of bloated old gits in strange costumes who twirl and pose and seem to find their antics richly entertaining. They claim that they’re embracing the future but, just like the sad Morris dancers, they’re stuck in the rituals of a quaint and half-forgotten era. Space travel. Is there anything more last century?
Transforming the House of Lords
Come off it. Let’s not revive this pointless argument unless we mean business for once. Reformers always make the error of proposing an august and influential new senate when it would be far simpler to let the present chamber self-destruct by making it look tacky, powerless and irrelevant. Which is easily achieved by turning a peerage into a transferrable possession, like a bungalow, a hot air balloon or a fiver. If the honour can be bought – which it can – why can’t it be sold too? The price should be capped at a million pounds, to prevent the market from over-heating, and half of the cash should go to the Treasury with the rest remaining with the vendor. Overseas membership will be permitted and within weeks the list of peers will swell with money-launderers, drug barons, kleptocrats and billionaire war-criminals from the four corners of the earth. Problem solved. No self-respecting public figure will want to remain in a club whose members include Lord Trump, Earl Putin, Duke Ji of Tiananmen Square and Baroness Mone.
Real reform will mean scrapping the Lords entirely and reducing the Commons to 300 MPs with a slimmed down cabinet of just ten. These smaller, leaner bodies will be able to conduct their business in the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre. And our world-famous parliamentary buildings can be administered as a seven-star hotel for the super-wealthy. Once the green benches have been converted into luxury bedrooms, guests will be able to do to each other what MPs have been doing to the voters for centuries.
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