Comment on: There's not much of the NHS left to cut

Comment on:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/16/lucy-mangan-nhs-frontline-cuts

The proposed NHS reforms have created more concerned quacks than were heard from the village duckpond when news got round that the Droitwich duckfucker had broken out of Dudley nick and was heading home to indulge his foul fowl habit.

But, really, what did you expect? A new Government gets in and makes changes to the NHS, that’s what Governments do. Political parties rarely give the priorities in their manifestos as standardising the membership regulations for gargoyle fancier societies, bringing back sweets in jars and resurrecting betamax as the video format of choice. No, a new Government decides that they will put the country back on its feet and an essential part of that strategy is reducing the availability of beds. In hospitals.

It’s easy to have a go at the NHS managers, because nobody likes a bloke in a suit who tumesces every time he hears the term ‘vision statement’.

Nurses? Nurses we like. Nurses with their starched uniforms and dedication. Moreover, men of a certain age get a faraway look in their eye and go all unnecessary in the trouser department whenever they hear the theme tune to ‘Angels’. See also: ‘Carry on’.

Surgeons? Surgeons we admire because anyone who has ever tried to put together an Airfix Harrier Jump Jet (buy them now before the Government axe the 1/32 scale armed forces as well kids) and has ended up with a glue-smeared canopy and more bits of the kit stuck to their fingers than are stuck together, or who has tried to fix something by taking the back off it and faffing around with a screwdriver, only to have parts left over when you’ve finished the job, respects anyone who can poke wet, wild and wobbly things and still have a breathing patient and shoes free of bloodstains at the end of it all.

Want to save the NHS some money? Easy. Here’s three ways to make a start.

People responsible for their own injuries have to pay for their own treatment. If you have the money to indulge in a ‘sport’ that involves making a bungee jump using a rope that’s past its twang-by date, you have the money to have your feet sewn back on to your ankles, and you have the money to pay the bonus to get a surgeon who knows the difference between L and R. This measure specifically excludes smokers and drinkers, who paid the tax that built the very hospital that they are being treated in. In fact…if you don’t drink and smoke you should have to pay a National Insurance premium, because others are bravely doing more than their fair share to pay for your iron supplements because you are a bloody vegetarian or something.

Replace the entire ambulance fleet with Toyota pick-up trucks. Is anyone still using these for the purpose they were actually intended for; letting builders, serial killers, illegal immigrant smugglers and sheep rustlers move stuff around under a tarpaulin? So many folk in Libya are using them as mobile machine gun platforms that I’m wondering if the latest versions come with an iPod dock, sat nav and a mount for an M2 Browning.

Look, if somebody can get tossed into the back of one of these things and get driven to a field hospital after being on the wrong end of some horrific atrocity, then surely we could use them in cases where somebody needs to be taken to hospital because they have a headache in their tummy following an ill-judged experiment involving ‘prawn surprise’.

People who believe in homeopathy don’t get any real drugs. Ever. So, you have some hard to diagnose complaint that conventional medicine doesn’t understand…like ennui? Luckily, your local aromatherapy store has just the thing, and a few drops of essential oils in your bath later you are feeling better and, bonus, are irresistible to foxes.

Great, waste your own money, but not mine, and certainly don’t bed block the bloke who has just had a lapse of concentration at his lathe. The bonus is that this can save a shedload of money, because you can extend it to people who have a belief in the healing power of prayer (‘I’m going to prey really hard that your arse reattaches itself after that hunting accident…no luck? Oh dear.’).

Finally – people who appear on the Jeremy Kyle show have their organs harvested. No? Oh, OK, people that appear on Bargain Hunt and Cash in the Attic are on the compulsory pre-mortality register as well.

Comment on: 'Dearly beloved...fight'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/09/arguments-over-wills-lucy-mangan

Wills are a sort of socially acceptable bribery, giving people things so that they might remember you fondly. Or at all. Because let's face it, for many people their greatest achievement is that at least they were never successfully prosecuted for engaging in an act of self-pollution in front of the wet fish counter at Morrisons.

Leaving vast sums to good causes is seen as eccentric, and The English admire eccentricity. God alone knows there's little enough to be proud of if you're English these days, so that's the way to play it, be proud of the little things. The problem is one of prohibitions on pride; one is not allowed to be proud of the things that made England great, like toil, a rigid class system, heavy machinery, the smell of swarfega and the simple application of a water cooled, belt fed machine shotgun to quell a civil disturbance. Now, essentially, one has to rely on made up stuff, like Marmite. Reading about somebody giving away money you had no chance of inheriting has exactly the same comforting sensation as dissolving a rollo under your tongue.

And it's rare, because arranging Revenge From Beyond The Grave is well beyond the capabilities of most people. (Unless you're Doctor Phibes, or Major Gander C.B., T.D.)

Folk have enough trouble organising their lives on a day by day basis, even when they are there to make informed decisions in real time, so for the majority of people death is a disadvantage bordering on disability. Part of the problem may be a sense of perspective, if you are the sort of person who displays grief of operatic proportions just because your supermarket no longer stocks your favourite flavour of packet soup, then chances are you are unlikely to maintain the focus needed to be able to devise a fittingly fiendish plot against anyone you consider ever even slightly slighted you.

And that is what a great will is all about - not the simple option of working out what your grasping relatives really, really don't like, then leaving all your money to the society for the advancement of vegetarianism or something equally bloody pointless and, when the will is read to them, having a photograph of their shocked and sick faces taken and e mailed to you at your.name@afterlife.co.uk (look, if God is an Englishman, it stands to reason that heaven will have a .co.uk address, right?) because hey, you never know, and what fun to see the disappointed faces, like the ultimate satisfying Antiques Roadshow moments, when prim and greedy people are told that their priceless po that Queen Victoria was said to have tinkled in is obviously a fake - but something sweetly complex.

A great will should set a series of tasks and labours for your feckless relatives through which they will learn lessons about life, each other, the true nature of what is valuable and that you can't put a price on happiness, the true test of which will be whether they stab the solicitor to death with his own fountain pen in a spite-fuelled explosion of rage when, with a smile, he reveals that yes, they now inherit...but that all your wealth was spent on financing the quirky tasks recently performed and that the sum total of the estate is now a single saucy seaside postcard found at the back of your desk.

Wills can be a tricky thing, as can making one. Possibly that's why a made up statistic of people who should have wills have yet to make them. It could be that they don't know how to divide their spoils; for instance you want to be fair and hence divide your collection of classic seventies porn mags evenly between your three nieces, but at the same time hate the idea of breaking up the collection. Much more likely is you just think you're immortal. That's why 'make a will...NOW' posters should be placed prominently at places where we have a brush with mortality and death can feel nearer than normal, like a doctor's waiting room, an aeroplane encountering turbulence or the check out line at Ikea.

Comment on: 'The UK census, it's just a big box of ticks'

Comment on: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/19/lucy-mangan-uk-census-politics

As anyone who, after a simple misunderstanding, has had their binoculars confiscated by a magistrate can attest, the English are peculiar about their privacy. At the start of the century it was predicted that the largest single issue facing the on-line community was going to be privacy. And that prediction was right, but in exactly the opposite way that the bearded social scientist crossed with Mystic Meg making it intended. Instead of us all jealously guarding our privacy, there seems to be a rush by certain people to push the details of their private lives at anyone that will pay attention or, to give it its technical name, Facebook.

The Government could save a fortune by getting Facebook to undertake the census rather than Lockheed Martin (a company more recognised for delivering ballistic missiles than forms that allow you to consider yourself quite the wit by listing your religion as 'Jedi'). Not only would this allow everyone to list their personal details, but to make the exercise self financing this information could then be sold on to marketing companies the next time Facebook updated its privacy settings and all the users ticked the 'I accept these terms and conditions - even the one about using my photographs as 'before' images in adverts for weight loss pills, face creams or self help books on fashion and grooming' box, without reading them first.

Not only that but social networking gets into a lot more detail than: 'How many VHS box sets of 'Buffy the vampire slayer' do you still have knocking around?' or whatever else they are asking in the census this time round, and in real time too. If the Government wants to know how many people are: 'in a relationship, but increasingly irritated at my partner's habit of sucking Quavers until they dissolve while watching telly, and building up to Do Something about it', right now, then social networking can deliver.

Of course, while people are quite happy to share their snapshots, opinions, thoughts and details of their relationship status with the world, they are rightly reticent to share any personal details, at all, with the Government. This is for two reasons. The first is the fear that the data will somehow fall into the hands of an twisted megalomanic and be used for evil. This is an entirely reasonable fear if you substitute the treasury for the undersea volcano base that said twisted megalomaniac resides in. The second reason is that the government will collate the name and address of everyone in Britain in a handy DVD form that can be left on a train, where it will be found by somebody who works in marketing and, as a result, you will spend the rest if your life receiving direct mail about yoghurt.

The biggest problem with the census in it's current form though is that it has no feature that allows you to include a photograph, or even a simple line drawing, of yourself. This ironically neatly illustrates the gulf of understanding that exists between the snoopers and the public. The government values a census because it provides data on who lives where and so on. The public values a census because it not only gives middle class people who are researching their family tree hours of fun and an excuse to use the internet for reasons other than download money-off coupons for biscuits but, vitally, is key to producing that moment in every episode of 'who do you think you are' where a well spoken but slightly irritating thespian discovers that they are directly descended not from Latvian nobility as they always believed, but a instead from somebody who was common as muck and who spent a spell banged up in Strangeways for Lurking Near Duckponds.

Such a moment is always accompanied by a grainy snapshot of some cross eyed rickets riddled bloke in a battered hat and disgrace boots and that's what the census lacks, a chance for us to record now for posterity the images that might pop up centuries hence to mortify our ancestors. And if you can sport a huge stove hat and whiskers while doing so, then so much the better.

Comment on: 'We're in a right state'

Comment on: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/12/disability-britain-society-lucy-mangan?commentpage=last#end-of-comments

Partial repost.

Society ascribes a sliding scale of deference to illness and infirmity. If your inability to rise from your bed is caused by, for instance, that genius idea you had at half nine the previous night to switch to shorts, and your symptoms include headache, nausea, 40% proof perspiration and the nagging thought that you did something dreadful in your left shoe last night, you are unlikely to get much sympathy. Consideration for others should, however, be extended to those who have trouble getting about, ranging from those struggling with three bags or more of rebellious shopping, through those with sticks or crutches and wheelchairs, all the way up to speeding ambulances or creeping hearses.

The possible exception is when one sees a tanned, fit looking sort with a colourful cast on his foot and you briefly wonder how deserving of sympathy is somebody who may have just stubbed their toe when pissed out their skull on schnapps during their recent skiing holiday.

Social attitudes towards illness and infirmity have changed significantly over time. A hundred years ago, there was a simple scale; standard-issue ‘healthy’ was upright and able-bodied, but afflicted by any number and combination of maladies that stunted your growth, gave you sores, caused you to walk funny, caused you to look funny, or caused people to look funny at you, throw rocks at you, or in extreme cases hound you out of the village with pitchforks.

If you were ‘poorly’ this normally meant that working eighteen hours a day in a factory or down a coal mine had left you with the sort of cough that would shake a lesser man apart at the seams and a talent for producing different coloured phlegm to order, including multi-coloured on bank holidays.

‘Badly’ was a description of the after-effects of a threshing accident. Today we would say ‘in a critical condition’ or ‘has anybody found his head yet?’ In the huge open plan mills of the industrial revolution, being caught in a loom and accidentally woven into the pattern of a carpet was so common that the drama was downplayed. Likewise, farming and industrial machinery consisted of overheated boilers, spinning flanges, swooping sharp bits and, of course, flywheels driving exposed belt-loops designed to catch not just extremities but bonnets, frilly shirts and other stunningly impractical clothing of the age.

Luckily, we now have advances not just in health and safety, but tight clothing and, of course, medication. But even the cure can be tricky. For instance, not long ago I decided to treat a sniffle by trying an allegedly ‘non-drowsy’ berry-flavoured drink. What I remember is a sensation of hot ribena and then waking up at two in the afternoon feeling a bit queer and not at all surprised that housewives get hooked on painkillers, it makes the dull bit of the afternoon go quicker than two sherries and an episode of ‘antiques roadshow’.

But at least it was a proper chemical cure. When faced with a complex problem or illness there’s nothing worse than these quack cures that homoeopathists peddle - shoving a banana up your arse to cure a headache or whatever (peel it first - you don’t want to look stupid). The purveyors of quack cures should, at least, be honest in their trade, possibly by ditching the white lab coat and simply rolling into town in a horse-drawn wagon, pulling up in the town square and putting on a medicine show flogging ‘Professor McTeeths all-nachural-snakebite-liniment’, a patent cure-all for warts, coughs, lost limbs, teenage boys playing with themselves and, if you drink the stuff, sobriety.

Of course there is a school of thought that you can treat just about anything with alcohol. For instance the belief that a ‘hot toddy’ can have a positive benefit on a cold is so widespread that it’s a wonder you can’t get Glenfiddich on the NHS. Certainly there’s a time and a place for alcohol in the treatment of illness; having a drink to celebrate your hangover dissipating or knocking back an enormous gin while you tell your friends the tale of how you came to lose your arm, while standing on your brand-new tiger skin rug.

(Painful pelvis sounds like a right pain in the arse…and hip, and whole pelvisish region. Hope you are once more able to frolic like a spring lamb on speed soon).

The international day of: Insert Name Here

International days are a fine idea, international days celebrating something are a great idea, international days castigating or berating something or someone? Less of a great idea.

In truth, days where something is berated rather than celebrated tend to be on a national rather than international level, examples including Denmark’s annual ‘the-Goons-weren’t-actually-that-funny’ day, Argentina’s annual ‘No! to broccoli’ day and of course our very own forthcoming national ‘I do not fully understand Alternative Voting, but I don’t like it. Is it European?’ day (May 5th). Indeed just about the only international day of condemnation is: ‘is it just me, or is ‘Black Swan’ a bit over-rated?’ day (37 countries signed up so far (on Facebook at least) and counting).

As a species, we like to celebrate things. It brings us closer as a community, and by a community I of course mean as a collection of people who like a drink. That’s the great thing about The World, everyone in it likes a drink; I don’t care if you are in the desert or at the Poles, somebody somewhere will find a way to ferment their way to a fun time and invent a national beverage, even if it means adding clear spirit normally used to clean your snowmobile spark plugs to reindeer piss (known locally as a ‘vodka Red Nose’).

Of course, for real disagreements you have to go ultra local. Look, the fact that an individual can be undecided about something as simple as the purchase of a pair of purple socks (Don’t! the scarf was a mistake, let’s not compound things), essentially having an argument with themselves means that humans can have an argument at, basically, the cellular level. This is what allows two rational people to have a falling out about who’s turn it is to load the dishwasher and share the same bed while still seething with principles (but, importantly, not stabbing one another with cutlery…well, not until it’s clean).

Siblings and spouses can argue, as can villages; a few years ago there was a case of keen competition between two neighbouring villages for the regional title of ‘Britain in Bloom’. One morning, the villages of Little Twatting (or whatever) came out to find their blooms blighted. Skulduggery was suspected and, although nothing was ever proved, the subsequent success of Great Twatting (or whatever) coupled with the fact that the B&Q at Great Twatting (or whatever) had totally sold out of weedkiller the week before cast rather a shadow over what had, up until then, been a rather jolly affair.

Organised fun is no fun at all. Just look at ‘The Wicker Man’. That’s why the calendar if stuffed with Saints days and feast days and other forgotten religious festivals, mostly observed by only the most pious and an increasingly bitter clergy, who want their flock to understand the message of St Fistima (feast day 17th March, message: Romans have no sense of humour whatsoever about their gods).

If you want to have your local, regional, national or international day observed and celebrated, you’ve got to have a gimmick. You don’t even need alcohol, although it helps. You can mark a day of celebration with a pancake, or chasing a fast cheese down a steep slope (and if that doesn’t mark St John’s day, it should). It also helps if you can get the card and confectionary markets on side. In my more heretical moments I often wonder of Christianity was a scam cooked up by Cadbury’s and Hallmark to shift some product at an otherwise quiet time of year. And the initial launch went so well they decided to repeat the whole thing in a few months later and call it Easter. Proof positive will come when they announce that in addition to his birth and death, the church have decided to mark that other important rite of passage in a bloke’s life and that henceforth, 17 September shall be ‘Christ’s First Pint’ day.

It’s good to celebrate something positive. It was world book day this week and I celebrated the world flavour of this by reading a Chinese book. Untranslated. Didn’t understand a bloody word (pictogram, whatever) but I rather hope that somewhere in Liang Shang Po province some farmer stopped killing snakes in his paddy field long enough to read a P G Wodehouse short story, also untranslated…but then laugh half way down page two anyway. Some things really are universal and cross the language divide, and your valet disproving of your choice of cravat is one of them.

Pack up your troubles

Packing is an art, not a science and packing books is avant garde art. Not how to pack them (they are rectangular, this is not Tetris) but what to pack. To be sure, 97% of the world population of Jackie Collins books smells faintly of suntan lotion, but simply buying the holiday bonkbuster ignores the opportunities for impressing fellow travellers and intimidating the locals that the simple use of the right vintage of Penguin, battered to perfection, affords. Of course, I like to prop up the bar with my copy of ‘Chalet School Sluts’ (hardback, 1927, hand tinted illustrations by the author)which guarantees you uninterrupted boozing and, to be fair, on one occasion, the unwanted sexual advances of a confused Elinor Brent-Dyer enthusiast.

Try doing that with a Kindle.

Yes, Packing is an art. Even more so now that so many laws have been passed that seem intended to prevent the traveller from taking with him or her the very essentials that make a journey in the company of strangers bearable, such as a nosebag of recreational phamacuticals and a paid companion (prior to my latest trip, I thought ‘sex trafficking’ was a sort of upmarket dogging). I presume next on the list of things to be banned from taking on a bus will be the racier kind of literature. Truly, first they came for our aerosols and I didn’t speak up because I have a dread of ‘Lynx’. Then came for our tubes of moisturiser and I did not speak up because I prefer to moisturise from the inside out using miniatures of gin. But if they try and take my copy of ‘Chalet School Sluts’ then they will be faced with a display of rage that will make current events in the Middle East look like a toddler’s tantrum.

My own luggage of choice would be the Huxley and Feathertone portable Gentleman’s travelling wardrobe. Mahogany, with brass fixings, rhino-hide covering, ceramic fixtures and fittings, optional library and cocktail cabinet (never an either/or option) and of course the bespoke ‘Universal Translator’ – an enamelled tin megaphone through which to bellow loudly in English until the person or crowd you are addressing, who has no English, understand your demands for a decent toilet and enormous, ice-cool, gin based drink (not necessarily in that order) NOW! through sheer force of personality and decibels. It weighs as much as a Shetland pony unpacked but, believe me, there’s noting quite like walking into the lobby of a hotel followed by four sweating, straining bearers or, optionally, one porter and a fork-lift truck, to make an impression. All conversation in the bar of the Catford Travelodge for instance, is guaranteed to cease on arrival.

The only thing that rivals it for capacity are those enormous backpacks that tourists wear to annoy tube users. Not only are they huge (if they don’t contain a tent you can use them as one), but the latest fashion is to have so many accessories dangling from them it looks as though somebody is playing backpacker buckeroo.

Of course just as important as your luggage are the luggage labels that adorn it. Looking at those marvellous ‘travel to the Costa Brava by small gauge steam railroad’ posters of yore, showing healthy chaps with pipes and flappers in gauzy frocks taking in some Mediterranean scene, gripping a huge tumbler of gin even though the clock tower in the town clearly shows it’s just after eight in the morning (different rules apply when the British travel, that’s why they love to do it), one notices that the luggage is covered by a collage of square, rectangular or, if one has been East of the Bosporus, dodecahedron shaped luggage labels, showing far flung and exotic destinations. That’s why folk today feel the need to adorn their cars and caravans with stickers proudly proclaiming that they have been to Leicester, or even Gwent.

Today, ‘London to Shanghi by train, airship and camel train via Venice and Omar’s Opium Outlet’ has been replaced by a sticky label with a bar-code. But of course there is noting to prevent one from attaching ones own luggage labels to your suitcase to give it a jaunty, nostalgic appearance. My own battered valise (neither a Scottish delicacy nor a social disease) features a collection of stickers announcing to fellow passengers that I have visited Narnia, Mordor, Brobdingnag and, with the Miskatonic University expedition led by William Dyer, Antartica. There’s also a discoloured patch where my ‘Neverland’ sticker used to be, but I steamed that off after I started getting some very strange looks from those more familiar with the life and times of M Jackson than the works of J M Barrie.

Finally, whenever I travel, I make sure that I take along my preconceptions about the place and especially the people I am going to visit. While many might consider it dinner party, or at least pot noodle, racism to pitch up at a place with manner set to Kate Humble style levels of condescension when dealing with the locals, it means that one is either surprised and delighted that people are so different from expected, or, even better, all your bigoted ideas about them were correct.

Choices, choices

Selling has been with us for as long as there has been more mammoth meat than the tribe needed that day and some bloke painted a really, really, luscious drawing of a mammoth on the cave wall. This would ultimately lead to disappointment when the world’s first fast food customer looked inside their styrofoam (STILL not decomposed) container and wondered a) what relationship the slightly damp and manky contents within bore to the plump and delightful illustration on the wall and b) what the hell a gerkin was.

Selling an idea has been with us for a slightly shorter time, this required blokes in robes with questionable facial hair and a shedload of wine. Initially many of these ideas were quite straightforward and useful, dealing as they did with issues of mathmatics, geometry and so forth and would result in nothing more than ensuring the future employment of slightly lanky men who would make a living tutoring algebra and making the inventor of the protractor one of the wealthiest men on the planet.

However, it wasn’t long before the greybeards started coming up with ideas like democracy and freedom of expression and, what’s more, tried to persuade others that their ideas were good ones.

Government trying to sell something is not as straightforward as a campaign selling, say, pickle onion flavoured monster munch. One is trying to sell you something cooked up by evil trolls that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth and is not at all good for you, the other is a delicious snack remembered with fond nostalgia. (But, let’s be honest, was probably cooked up by evil trolls, left a nasty taste in the mouth, was not at all good for you AND left you with chemically induced halitosis) (and a slightly dirty feeling that you’d not experience again until your first illicit shag) (and even then not with the same intensity).

Previous Government ad campaigns have basically fallen into two categories.

The first tried to terrify you. The one about not bonking icebergs or whatever was a good example and had a profound effect on me, to the extent that not only icebergs but penguins, pemmican and the even the cresta run are all safe from my sexual attention. And there was ‘protect and survive’, where the Voice Of Doom explained that if you hid in airing cupboard, you’d be safe from a thermonuclear blast. Whether this was followed by a further film giving recipes for radioactive rat I don’t know, I was busy changing out of damp pants.

But they were as nothing compared with that cartoon about the kid who decided to wander onto the thin ice, which concluded with a shot of the flickering lights of an ambulance in the chill dusk as the bowed figures carried a shape on a stretcher. A decade on and anyone watching a soft focus artfully shot cartoon about a wintry scene was emptied of all emotion except harrowing dread. That’s why I cry when I watch ‘The Snowman’, whimsy be damned.

The other type of Government advertising is when they sold you something you already owned, like utilities. ‘If you see Sid, tell him…that in a decade all his gas will come from politically unstable Eastern European states which previously we had feared because they had sheds full of rusting nuclear weapons or, worse, empty sheds where rusting nuclear weapons should be prior to being sold to terrorists, but who can now hold the nation to ransom by turning off the tap the next time there’s a cold snap’.

Wisdom of the policy aside, I would have liked to see the ad campaign selling off the forests. Question, who would you get to front it, a celeb or a chirpy CGI squirrel called Terry Nutkins who would blether on about how being given the chance to buy his own tree would give him a foot on the property ladder? Or an Ewok?

Selling two conflicting ideas though? Easy. Crisp makers have campaigns to ‘support’ a particular flavour. Result: you just end up buying more of something that’s the same thing really, you think you’ve exercised choice, and you have a nasty taste in your mouth.

Stuff

I read recently that some supermarket is going to start 'offering' (that is, charging for) a dating service whereby they set you up with a potential partner based on the contents of your respective baskets.

Personally I don't think it's the greatest idea in the world to match people with similar purchasing habits, as nothing puts a strain on a relationship quite like the bitter resentment that stems from your partner eating the last bag of quavers, while people who buy quorn should simply not be allowed to breed.

At the value end of the dating service, it's probably nothing more sophisticated than making sure that people who bulk-buy marmite are not matched with those who do not, while, supermarkets being supermarkets, there's probably a luxury end where blokes can not only be set up with women, but can be informed when they are likely to be ovulating and so time their approach to coincide with a time their prospective partner is craving sperm and hence not too picky.

Of course the idea is not new, people have been checking each other out at the check out for years. Indeed it’s quite acceptable to load your basket with the sort of stuff that would make you attractive to the opposite sex, like the keys to your villa in Italy and plenty of single portion ready meals. Try to avoid a dozen cans of cheap, super-strength cider and a DVD featuring Jeremy Clarkson though.

The service is predicated on the assumption that we are defined by what we consume and, certainly, our stuff gives a clue as to our personality. For instance, if a bloke has shelves full of action figures still in their boxes, he’s likely to be a reasonable sort and the body parts in his freezer will be neatly stacked. However, if a young woman has shelves full of My Little Pony, out of their boxes and showing clear signs of grooming, run! Use the window, not the door, it’s quicker. Never mind the drop, just do it man!

Men have, of course, been storing their tat off-site in bespoke stuff-deposit structures for many years and a glimpse into a chap’s shed is truly a glimpse into his soul, except with more homebrew and well-thumbed porn. That people now have so much stuff they don’t have a place for it all and have spent so much on it they can’t afford to move to a bigger home has not gone unnoticed by business, hence those self-storage places that have sprung up round the country, allowing couples who are moving in together a place to hide, sorry to store all his hideous furniture and framed movie posters until she can eBay the lot or simply torch the place.

By the way, if a female colleague mentions in passing that she is moving at the weekend and putting some of her stuff in storage, remarking that it’ll transform the inside of the storage unit into something resembling a typical female’s front room, don’t on Monday morning ask her if she had a hard time stuffing her ladycave at the weekend. The resulting tribunal won’t result in you being sacked, but you will be tagged as ‘insensitive’ by HR. Like I care.

I’ve always thought that if my personality was wiped as the result of some medical experiment gone wrong, conspiracy or, more likely, trying to fork a muffin out of the toaster while wearing a hat made of tin-foil, I could construct it by re-reading all the books I own, being in the lucky position of not having an original thought in my head and having cobbled together what passes for a personality from a collection of fiction and the odd reference book about cheese. Umberto Eco wrote about this process in ‘The mysterious flame of Queen Loana’ so it turns out that even that idea’s not original. I mean, I thought of it first, but just because he wrote it down he gets all the credit.

But he didn’t take it to its logical conclusion, just like putting fresh fruit in your shopping basket because you know nobody wholesome is going to strike up a conversation with you if it contained your actual dietary staples of pot noodle and mars bars, you could load your reading matter to tailor your reconstructed personality to something, well, a little less freakish.

And the place to start if your teenage diaries. That’s why I’m currently bidding on eBay for a blank Letts diary for my teen years. I’ll then be able to substitute this for my actual diary and convince myself that I was in fact a stylish, confident and happy teen, rather than the shambling collection of grease and neuroses that was actually the case. Hence, for instance, replacing this not untypical entry: ‘Saw [redacted] playing netball today. Made me feel funny. Went home, touched myself. Watched ‘Allo ‘Allo. Went to bed.’ with the rather more erudite ‘Saw [redacted] playing netball. She is beauty poise and elegance and my heart swells with yearning, a divine ache every time I see her. Went home, masturbated to the point of dehydration, watched ‘Allo ‘Allo. Went to bed’.

Big Society and Dystopia repost

Growing up, those twin essential devices from stopping healthy developmental play in the fresh air; foxed-to-the-point-of-badgered library books and terrifying BBC children’s drama, provided essential preparation for what to expect from the dystopian future.

If you read the books of John Christopher, dystopia came in the form of some sort of disaster that set technology levels back to those of the dark ages (alien invasion, mankind tinkering with nature, everyone on the planet simultaneously joining Civil War re-enactment societies, that sort of thing), while the BBC’s Bleak Future was essentially far muddier then the present, being a place where the appearance of a steam engine was greeted with exactly the sort of slack-jawed mixture of fear and awe currently on the faces of the kiddies being traumatised by this tea-time apocalyptic drama, filmed in the West Midlands to save money.

The drama conveyed to kiddies with some style that when they grew up there would be more chance of them being a subsistence farmer than a spaceman* and, most brutally of all, ‘Angel Delight’ would no longer existed.

What was never predicted (along with mobile ‘phone ring tones so irritating it makes you wonder if perhaps the plot of some of these stories: that advanced technology is jealously guarded by a social elite or at least people with taste, is not in fact a good idea) was the solution proposed by politicians to head off a future where the fabric of society is as ragged as a pair of Primark pants after a boil wash: the Big Society.

The Big Society is not, as you might think, Brobdingnag, but rather a model for the future of community services. Essentially funding is slashed for supporting council services and the people who rely on those services are told to ‘get on with it’, much in the way the same phrase is used when you are locked in your study with a bottle of scotch and a service revolver after you have lost a rather important battle or, worse still, committed social suicide by tonguing an unsuitable minor royal.

The Big Society suffered a set-back this week when Liverpool Council announced that they didn’t want to be considered part of the pilot for an idea thought up by posh boys, but instead were quite content to continue to be considered as a city of lovable rogues, chirpy female flatmates or, of course, lesbian patio-layers (might be getting that last one a bit confused).

A ‘pilot’ by the way is where you don't have enough confidence to roll out an ill-conceived scheme nationally and so do it in a few backwater areas. So, when it bombs like a fat kid jumping into a swimming pool, you can explain that either the idea needs work or the bloody yokels in charge of the pilot couldn't be trusted to run a car boot stall, never mind a complex social experiment and anyway, next time the posters will be better).

The gist of the Big Society is that English people, who by tradition would all like to live in castles with moats far from any neighbours and by practice only really talk to their neighbours if they are caught dumping their garden waste over the fence, are supposed to take a community approach and look after things like keeping the streets tidy and, no doubt when the cuts to public services really start to bite, other jobs currently undertaken by trained professionals including; maintaining parks (we can graze our sheep on them when we're all reduced to subsistence farming), health care (who needs doctors now we have the internet - what's easier, seven years at medical school or Googling 'tickly cough'?), or air traffic control.

What certainly won’t be needed are civic poo scoopers. This is thanks to the invention of the doggie bag. Certainly not to be confused with a device used to transport expensive leftovers from a restaurant (itself an alien concept to anyone brought up to believe that not scraping the plate at the Berni Inn until the last morsel of food, and quite a lot of the pattern, was removed was a sin), but a bag full of Scoobie Poo. Thanks to resilient, hole-free (and that’s important), plastic bags, owners of defecating hounds can now swoop with the speed of a cockle-picker racing the tide and simultaneously bag the unthinkable and make a mental note to stop feeding Fido leftover masala.

*Ironically, this is true, if by subsistence level farmer you mean owner of a boutique farm in the Cotswolds producing some sort of organic cheese and pork scratching smoothie concoction that is perversely popular in Japan, sells for a fortune at farmers’ markets and has just been picked up for national distribution by Waitrose.