Frost at midnight

Laudanum loving scribe Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a fabulous poem titled 'Frost at midnight' which begins with the enchanting phrase 'The frost performs its secret ministry'. It goes on to describe how his son will have opportunities that Coleridge never had when he himself was growing up, such as looking up at a clear sky, and, presumably, ready access to laudanum, very much the calpol of the romantic era, but concludes once more with a reference to the ministry of frost.

If there were a Ministry of Frost, one imagines that it would have been busy earlier in the year, when a succession of hard frosts resulted in a number of sporting fixtures being called off. Horse racing is always being called off when the going shifts from 'firm' to 'iron'. It's a dangerous sport at the best of times but on a frosty morn the only way to make it more dangerous would be to actually jump the horses into the intake of a roaring jet engine. Football too suffers cancellations, both in the Premiershit, and at a more local level, as evidenced by the sight of an optimistic but disconsolate boy returning from the park where Little League had been abandoned that morning, sullenly booting a plastic bottle along the pavement.

If one were to work in the public sector, currently it seems subject to more strikes than championship evening at 'Lanes of Glory Bowlarama', then the Ministry of Frost seems like a pretty good place to do so. It conjures the image of a government department that was originally established to officially declare the Thames safe for a frost fair (done by driving a horse and cart across the river - history does not record what happened to the 'looks like it needs another day' attempts but one suspects that they did not result in a short but harrowing public information film advising children not to drive horses and carts across rivers) and later went on to approve the frost patterns that would be etched across windows, which is still housed in a magnificent Victorian building and where the staff have very little to do during May to September, unless they are attached to the Scottish office.

The secret Ministry is also strongly evocative of John Steed turning up for work and foiling an enemy plot using nothing more than charm and a super-vixen side kick specialising in mixed martial arts. Because while queues grow at Heathrow and people wait for up to three hours to enter Britain, it's still true that while the public sector has of late got a bit bolshie and struck, there are still certain roles that one simply cannot imagine the private sector undertaking. Spying is one of them, if James Bond worked for Group 4 the world would be a glowing cinder ruled by a nutter in the sole remaining undersea volcano base.

As for queues at Heathrow, anyone who has queued for one of the more popular rides at Alton Towers will know that three hours is a doddle, and at Alton Towers you are actually queuing to get on a ride that will throw you about, instil genuine terror, make you wonder about the safety of the thing and leave you feeling sweaty with anxiety, at least at Heathrow you have just got off something that left you like that and you can have a drink and a weep in the queue. Other airports are available although 'Cardiff, gateway to the Games' is a bit of a stretch.

Other fabulous private sector queuing experiences include Clinton Cards. While the last thing anyone needs is another high street chain going under, one does have to wonder about a business model that appeared to consist of having two bored teens talk to one another at the till while studiously ignoring the queue of customers to the extent that it provokes an existential crisis in the more insecure. Possibly the source of apparent indifference is bitterness based around selling thousands of valentine's cards but never receiving one, because Cupid would need an aim like Robin bloody Hood and shoot rohypnol tipped arrows to make the average Clinton's shop assistant a romantic object.

Sign here

It should come as no surprise to anyone that as soon as the government set up a web site where one could start a petition for your pet subject to be debated in parliament, the thing has dozens of near-identical petitions all about bringing back the death penalty. I think the only difference between them is the way they have structured the sentence ‘bring back the death penalty’ and that some of them have named their favoured form of execution, such as hanging, which has seen a renewed popularity ever since Saddam Hussain was strung up on Youtube. Certainly, the petition does seem to attract the hang ‘em and flog’ em brigade (I didn’t see if flogging, birching or a bloody good seeing to with a cricket bat were also being suggested for lesser crimes, such as being foreign, as the site had, ironically, died under the weight of the hits it was getting) but I think it’s a certainty that when it comes to methods of dispatching criminals, nobody has started a petition that mentions a lovely Swiss clinic with some Bach, a comfy chair and some poisoned toblorone as the way they’d like to see justice done.

Anyone who has ever tried to get a petition going for anything constructive, like saving a tree or community centre, or getting a level crossing built, will know that it can be a bit of a slog. Everyone likes habitats for squirrels and being able to cross the road, but putting down your name can be a bit of a chore, no?

That’s why the internet is so good for these sorts of petitions, especially in terms of bringing back things that we used to have, such as hanging or rickets. Anyone who has visited one of the many web-sites devoted to explaining why crisps tasted better ion the 1970s (answer: the additives and flavourings they used back then are now illegal. Proper pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch was the only snack to have a scientifically recognised half-life) will tell you that nostalgia drives the internet.

That’s why as well as the usual bollocks about the death penalty and having some sock puppet children’s teevee presenter ushered in as Prime Minister, the most popular petitions are likely to revolve around passing a law that requires the reintroduction of some biscuit from the 1970’s, Top Of The Pops being back on telly every Thursday and all porn to be removed from the internet and instead replaced by proper jazz-mags, available only from garages or left in a slightly soiled condition under a hedge.

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.

The Big Society

Our council is, apparently, a Big Society pilot area. I have no idea what Big Society is but I know what a pilot scheme is; it's where you don't have enough confidence tho roll out an ill-conceived scheme nationally and so do it in a few backwater areas and, when it bombs like a fat kid jumping into a swimming pool, 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.

So what, exactly is the Big Society? Well, it's the lynchpin Conservative policy that is, apparently, so brilliant that nobody can quite explain it. I think the gist of it is however 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, policing them too. You can tell that Big Society is a policy and not just an idea because it's capitalised, which ironically much of public spending is not.

In short it's an idea for avoiding a bloodbath following the spending cuts by expecting volunteers to do all the work. Crucially, this ignores the fact that most people who try to organise things in neighbourhoods are self-appointed irritants, usually in cardigans, with very fixed ideas about serving booze at street parties.

The Big Society (and it really is a load of BS) pilot has manifested itself on the streets with the arrival of, of all things, grit bins. That's right, every street now has a large yellow receptacle full of salt.

And each one is numbered. My first reaction, I'm ashamed to admit, was not to applaud this initiative (remembering last winter I realise that ready access to grit is a bloody good idea, but in all honesty I rather like the idea of it being sprayed from the back of a lorry or shovelled by a couple of blokes with fluorescent jackets while I observe proceedings from the safety of a pub while 'working from home' on a snow day), but to think what a good little project it would be to photograph them all, collect the set as it were.

This is as close to autism as you can get without actually being called 'Rain Man' by your friends, but let's not worry about that now.

The idea, of course, is that come the first snowfall, everyone grabs their shovel and heads for the nearest bin. We grit our own paths and roads and the transport infrastructure is safe. Hoorah. Of course, the thing to do is to get out there now, in the dead of night (currently 4.30pm in these wintry days) and load the contents of the nearest bins into a bin bag for stockpiling in your shed. This can then be sold on to neighbours for a pound a scoop when the first flake hits the floor and the inevitable panic starts or, even better, sold back to the council when their grit stocks expire, probably on day two of any snowy weather.

So that's big society; hoards of happy residents gritting their drives and the areas of the pavement just outside their drives where they accidentally spray grit in their enthusiasm, and looking at the pristine snow that covers the world beyond their drive, muttering darkly about council tax and whiling away their time mentally composing outraged letters that froth with indignation for the local paper.

But why stop at gritting? Other jobs currently undertaken by trained professionals that could be done by the public include maintaining parks (we can graze our sheep on them when we're all reduced to subsistence level living), health care (who needs doctors now we have the internet - what's easier, seven years at medical school or Googling 'nasty cough'?), or air traffic control.

Council grittier used to be grossly inappropriate rhyming slang for posterior, now it's not even an occupation or vocation, it's recreation.