New Year – New Nazi?
When you’re a kid, a letterbox is nothing but fun. It’s what brightly coloured envelopes drop through on your birthday – the thicker the better (how many of us learned to hate the padded card at an early age – cards should be thick because of the huge wad of book tokens in them dammit!).
As you grow older, the tyranny of the letterbox starts – exam results, results of interviews and, for my generation at least, break-up letters from that girl you met on a French camp-site who you swore eternal love to but, more importantly, told all your mates you had ‘done it’ with’.
In proper adulthood, with the advent of e mail, we don’t even get break-up letters anymore, just a txt sying ‘u r dmpt’. The bills I can just about handle, because I’m still drinking enough these days to need my credit card bill to remind me of where I was on the night in question. Sometimes a pocket full of loose change and a napkin with a telephone number (that turns out to be an Armenian take-away place) and the message ‘call me, Sadie xxx’ are not enough.
I’ve even learned to put up with the annoying junk mail we get through the letter box – the pizza places, Indian and Chinese places that all deliver. The guys who deliver these are out in all weathers and I have some sympathy. I also have a huge recycling bin and the germ of an idea for a design for an automatic junk mail sorting chute that fits to any letter-box. £99.99 fitted, £109.99 with optional shredder attachment. I’ll get Postman Pat to do the advert.
If you’re a known kiddie fiddler, you get flaming badger-shit posted through your letter-box. If you’re a townie who crosses your new country neighbours, you get a flaming badger, still alive, posted through (to go with the crow nailed to your door). If you live in the Midlands, you get about ten gallons a second of flood water at the moment.
If you’re me, you got, one day in January, on the SAME day no less, a plain white (irony ahoy) envelope containing a glossy leaflet for UKIP and, in a triumph of hope over expectation or reality, a form explaining how you can donate! Using the same gardening tongs I use to pick up and dispose of fox shit, I picked it up off the mat and put it in the recycling, then went to wash my hands. When I came back, there was a leaflet for the BNP on the mat.
I didn’t open it, but the front image was fairly arresting – under the caption ‘do you want England to look like this’ was a scene that wouldn’t be out of place on a box of shortbread – morris dancers, people enjoying a pint and so on. Underneath was the caption ‘OR THIS’ and a photograph of a group of women in burkas.
Folk dancing or Islamic extremism? Tough one. I recycled the leaflet and went for a shower.
What puzzled me was what prompted two right-wing parties to leaflet on the same day? I guess they are both chasing the same vote – maybe they independently arrived at the conclusion that their 2008 offensive (very) should start early, or maybe the BNP guy saw the UKIP guy and mobilised an instant response. Either way, maybe they should consolidate? The second-to-last thing you want to do is split the right-wing nutter vote but the very last thing you want to do is overtax these people by expecting them to read two leaflets on the same day.
As you grow older, the tyranny of the letterbox starts – exam results, results of interviews and, for my generation at least, break-up letters from that girl you met on a French camp-site who you swore eternal love to but, more importantly, told all your mates you had ‘done it’ with’.
In proper adulthood, with the advent of e mail, we don’t even get break-up letters anymore, just a txt sying ‘u r dmpt’. The bills I can just about handle, because I’m still drinking enough these days to need my credit card bill to remind me of where I was on the night in question. Sometimes a pocket full of loose change and a napkin with a telephone number (that turns out to be an Armenian take-away place) and the message ‘call me, Sadie xxx’ are not enough.
I’ve even learned to put up with the annoying junk mail we get through the letter box – the pizza places, Indian and Chinese places that all deliver. The guys who deliver these are out in all weathers and I have some sympathy. I also have a huge recycling bin and the germ of an idea for a design for an automatic junk mail sorting chute that fits to any letter-box. £99.99 fitted, £109.99 with optional shredder attachment. I’ll get Postman Pat to do the advert.
If you’re a known kiddie fiddler, you get flaming badger-shit posted through your letter-box. If you’re a townie who crosses your new country neighbours, you get a flaming badger, still alive, posted through (to go with the crow nailed to your door). If you live in the Midlands, you get about ten gallons a second of flood water at the moment.
If you’re me, you got, one day in January, on the SAME day no less, a plain white (irony ahoy) envelope containing a glossy leaflet for UKIP and, in a triumph of hope over expectation or reality, a form explaining how you can donate! Using the same gardening tongs I use to pick up and dispose of fox shit, I picked it up off the mat and put it in the recycling, then went to wash my hands. When I came back, there was a leaflet for the BNP on the mat.
I didn’t open it, but the front image was fairly arresting – under the caption ‘do you want England to look like this’ was a scene that wouldn’t be out of place on a box of shortbread – morris dancers, people enjoying a pint and so on. Underneath was the caption ‘OR THIS’ and a photograph of a group of women in burkas.
Folk dancing or Islamic extremism? Tough one. I recycled the leaflet and went for a shower.
What puzzled me was what prompted two right-wing parties to leaflet on the same day? I guess they are both chasing the same vote – maybe they independently arrived at the conclusion that their 2008 offensive (very) should start early, or maybe the BNP guy saw the UKIP guy and mobilised an instant response. Either way, maybe they should consolidate? The second-to-last thing you want to do is split the right-wing nutter vote but the very last thing you want to do is overtax these people by expecting them to read two leaflets on the same day.
1 Comments:
I admit to having had the memory of the night before "jogged" a bit by going to check my bank account online to see where my card had been debited....my usual reaction is "oh damn, I forgot about those 4 drinks I bought there"....
Happy MLK day...and Robert E. Lee's birthday, too....which ever you prefer to celebrate is OK by me.
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