The Tories Want To Kill Us All (And Make Us Pay For The Funeral)

History will record that George Osborne’s main career aspiration was to become a fifth-rate, Walter-the-Softie version of Joseph Stalin.

In the geographical absence of gulags and salt mines and being too media savvy to machine gun en masse an entire social class of dissenters (just imagine the Twitter-hate he’d get for that), George’s solution is turn the rights of the modern working man against him; to subvert the last gasping vestiges of the Welfare State and choke the last breath of life out of any human rights declaration of the last 200 years in order to return us all to the dark glories of the workhouse and a more bizarre rule of lassaiz-fare... where people are encouraged to fend for themselves without government assistance but with the government still wanting to take a good cut of the profit.

Not satisfied with pushing the retirement age back a couple of years (and undoubtedly it will get pushed back even further until aged 98 I will have to resort to selling my own body on street corners just to be able to afford a cheap moussaka from Lidl), there are now plans afoot to dispense with the old system of employers providing sick pay for their employees.

The idea being floated by George "Uncle Joe" Osborne (the Chancellor Palpatine of the Exchequer) is that worker's themselves should provide provision for their own sick pay out of the wages they earn.

Speaking as someone who at the moment can't even afford to pay pension contributions towards financing my old age ("don't worry," says George, "you've got at least another 80 years working life ahead of you - plenty of time to save for a retirement you'll never reach") I can tell you now that if deductions were forcibly being made out of my earnings in lieu of potential future sick pay awards I would simply not be able to afford to live and therefore going to work in the first place would become a pointless endeavour. Going to work would only remain viable were I never ever to become sick. Or to be exact, were I never ever to take a sick day even though I might genuinely be exploding with typhoid or - in the dystopian Victorianesque future that George is undoubtedly masturbating over - smallpox.

Essentially, my simple theory posits that the Tories are trying to kill us all. By "us" I do, of course, mean just the non-wealthy workers who don't have enough money in their Government bailed-out bank accounts to successfully lobby their favourite political party to adequately represent their own singularly selfish viewpoint over those of the moral majority.

The modus operandi of our murder is simple. Worked to death with longer hours 7 days a week, taxed to the hilt to pay for the privileges of the rich, sick pay only if you can afford to make the contributions, no sick pay at all if you can't, work work work until you drop or until you get your "congratulations on your first centenary" letter from HM The Queen (whichever comes first). Thus huge saving are made - no sick pay and no pensions payments made because I guarantee that should anyone actually make it to a pensionable age they'll be so worn out and exhausted by 80 years' hard labour they'll be dead before the first e-payment is made into their bank account. The 7 ages of man will be truncated to: baby, child, man, workhorse and fertilizer.

And who will benefit from all these savings?

The poor? The repressed?

According to the Tory worldview they do not exist. Instead the country is full of fat, lazy, ne'er-do-wells who are only in dire straits because an over-indulgent government hasn't done enough to encourage them to stand up on their own two feet and make their own way in the world.

In other words, we're back to the old "spare the rod, spoil the child" guff which has always been used in ages past to justify naked callousness and simple cold-heartedness.

Which when you are trying to hold down three jobs to put food on the table for children whose whereabouts and welfare you can't monitor anymore because you're always at work trying to pay for the sick pay you daren't take is not what you want to hear from some over-privileged buffoon in a suit whose idea of poverty a few years back was having to include the mortgage for his paddock on his taxpayer funded expenses...

Murder is going to be done, my friends. Murder is going to be done.

Quick On The Draw

It’s too easy to make snide comments these days. To throw a disparaging remark into someone’s path. To toss a hand grenade of insult over the shield wall of “constructive criticism” and watch it explode from a safe distance.

 

The people that sow such barbs with impunity rarely seem to fear reprisals or even the possibility of being taken out by their own shrapnel. Of course, cowards that they are, they stand too far back. They stand fully enveloped in their Kevlar suits of “only being helpful”.

 

Don’t get me wrong. This post hasn’t been inspired by anyone or anything specific. People have taken so many pops at me and this blog recently I have got completely used to the detonations.

 

And it is that which has inspired this post.

 

You see, it’s too easy to take pot-shots these days. We all do it without thinking. We all do it as natural as breathing. Open our mouths, type something, and let the sting fly to its target. Bang. Gotcha. Onto the next one.

 

Why has abuse become such common currency?

 

The internet, the workplace, the press are all rife with it. Comedians take cheap shots at anyone who has fallen foul of the law or public morality just to get a laugh – people they have probably never met or had any personal dealings with. Our colleagues assassinate each other in whispering huddles that may or may not include you… and you are damned either way.

 

And this is just the way it is.

 

I find myself wondering if people were politer in (paradoxically) less enlightened times and places? In the Dark Ages, say? Or Mediaeval Europe? The Wild Wild West? Times when the common man went about armed and tooled up and ready to answer even the slightest insult with a red smile or an invasion of steel to the gut?

 

Did people watch their P’s and Q’s more? Dot their I’s and cross their T’s? Save their insults and barbs for under the breath mutterings that harmed no one and kept the water source from which we all drink free from poison and contagion?

 

Or did that length of steel at their side or that iron strapped round their waist make them feel they had the right to sneer even more? Make them feel they could say what the hell they liked and if the target didn’t like it, well, they could choose between swallowing it or sleeping the sleep you never wake from?

 

I suspect weaponry merely separated the truly arrogant from those who only pose. The true bastards from those merely trying to be. And at the end of the day too, there would have been polite, peacable men who kept their mastery of the martial arts under their hats until pushed to extremis. Maybe, sometimes, justice was done? Maybe for every insult made grosser with violence there was an insult met with a righteous meting out of pain that made some cocky loudmouth think twice before opening his mouth again?

 

I can’t work out which is better or which is worse.

 

Only that while sticks and stones may break my bones, a bullet to someone’s crust is going to shut them up forever. In which case, insults suddenly become completely unnecessary.

 

 

Public Death, Private Murder

One of the places we visited during our recent stay in deepest Gloucestershire was Slad. It was very much an off-the-cuff visit that we made at the end of the holiday on our return journey home as we knew beforehand that it was a tiny little village which sported no more than a church, a few houses and a pub. Hardly a tourist hotspot and not really worth an entire day out.

However, it was the birthplace and final resting place of Laurie Lee, one of Karen’s favourite authors. Most of you, I’m sure, will be familiar with the title Cider With Rosie even if you have never read the book.

I wasn’t expecting much from Slad to be honest.

But to be even more honest it was one of the most beautiful, peaceful places I have ever visited. There was a gentle calmness about the place which soothed the soul.

We found Laurie Lee’s grave with ease, pottered about the village – barely more than a single street – and then settled down for an ice cream at The Woolpack.

I was a little nervy of the pub if the truth be told. Karen had told me about one of the memories Lee had recounted in his book which centred around one of the village lads meeting an unfortunate end after a night of drinking in this very pub. Having travelled to New Zealand and returned much wealthier, said local boy was rather full of himself and, much to the chagrin of the those he’d left behind who’d never travelled much further than Pitchcombe, he proceeded to spend the entire night boasting and I daresay belittling the relative parochial mentality of his old childhood chums.

His pride met with fist and blows at closing time and the locals, having sweetened their own worldly inadequacies with the gift of a good kicking, left the poor chap unconscious in the snow.

He froze to death and was found dead the next morning.

The police investigation drew only shrugs and silence and there the matter ended – except for those in the know, of course. I’m sure Lee must have ruffled quite a few nervous feathers by including the story in his memoirs.

Thankfully I have not (as yet) travelled to New Zealand and decided I would keep my past holidays to Egypt and America under wraps... just in case. After all the pub could well still be a local tavern for local people.

As it was we were met with good humoured friendliness and a kindly, non-curious acceptance given that it was plain we were complete strangers (there can be no more than 20 people living in the entire village).

I think we spent a couple of hours there. Doing not very much at all. Just enjoying and soaking up the atmosphere and dreaming.

For all there were telegraph poles, chip and pin machines and modern cars parked about the place, it felt as if Slad had somehow been loosed from the normal constraints of the passage of time. Change obviously comes slowly and by small increments to this tiny little village. Even the adverts on the pub waste bins were for R White’s Lemonade. I haven’t seen that advertised publically in years.

It was a good place. Life felt wholesome there. Honest. More simple.

Of course, these are all just first impressions made in the space of a single moment. For all I know there was a bondage club in the house next door and the woman at the end of the road regularly hosts parties where car keys are thrown into a fruit bowl where peaches of all nationalities have never rested but have instead been bounced off the walls and a rubber sheeted four-poster with the kind of passion that one only sees in French art house movies.

But somehow I don’t think so.

Laurie Lee sleeps peacefully in the church yard over the road and Slad is still very much his dream.

Chaos And Misrule

How moral are you?

How righteous (if that’s the right word)? Do you do the right thing just because it is the right thing or because you fear cultural retribution? The law might be an ass but it cannot be denied that it keeps a good many of us on the straight and narrow. Without it do you ever wonder how many of us would be potential thugs? Potential murderers, even?

Without the thought of being someone’s bitch in the prison showers or snuggling up to Mr Big for a couple of quid’s worth of phone cards most of us, I suspect, would at sometime or other snap and bludgeon those around us to death with a Chubb fire extinguisher (or whatever heavy blunt instrument you happen to have at hand).

That might sound over the top but just think about it seriously for a moment.

When faced with an insanely infuriating work colleague or an overly unhelpful shop assistant or a belligerent neighbour who has yet again cut a mammoth sized limb from your precious Leylandii and dropped it onto your marijuana nursery don’t we all experience a Reggie Perrin moment or three and imagine taking a Black & Decker hedge trimmer to their jugular? Or pulping their face into bloody Papier-mâché with the mortar and pestle you bought on-line especially to grind up your Valium tablets for easier absorption?

Daily I have hacked, maimed, peppered and pulverized the people around me with a mental arsenal that, if it were real, would see me institutionalized for life. Reservoir Dogs style I have removed ears, noses, fingers (individually), various genitalia (some of them pre-cooked with an oxy acetylene welding torch), limbs and, when the devil inside has really taken me by the horns, internal organs which I then fantasize about sending to the local police inspector Jack The Ripper style accompanied by a note informing him that the bits I kept went down rather well sautéed in butter with a side order of fava beans.

And the weird thing is I don’t even know anyone named Clarisse.

If it were not for that metaphysical something deep inside that stops me every time I would be the desperately evasive fruit of a massive countrywide police hunt and, no doubt, the pin-up of every kitchensink chained chav this side of Watford.

But is it an inbred morality that stays my hand? An innate instinct toward decency?

Or is it just societal conditioning? Fear of the jug? An aversion to Big Vern’s personal, phallus-shaped soap-on-a-rope?

How can I call myself a decent morally-upstanding person when the only thing keeping me from eviscerating the pathetic organs of those around me is a desire to not be incarcerated for the rest of my born natural?

That isn’t morality! That isn’t righteousness!

It’s a weird kind of cowardice. It is self denial. At best it is a bizarre form of self-sacrifice for the good of the many.

And though in theory that is noble it is still not moral.

I leave you today with a thought from Voltaire: I have no morals - and yet I'm a very moral person.

It is so true.

But is it something to be proud of?

Dangerous Roads

The way I’m looking at it, the BBC is a bit of a bungling would-be murderer.

For the last three Sunday nights I’ve greatly enjoyed watching Dangerous Roads, a celebrity based travelogue, in which the BBC pairs up a couple of TV celebs and then sends them out in a 4x4 to some exotic part of the world that these guys could easily afford to visit on their own wages and then makes them drive several thousand kilometres along “one of the world’s most dangerous roads” in the vain hopes of killing them off in a spectacular cliff edge crash.

That the crash never happened is a testament to the safe driving style of the chosen celebs and the fact that some idiot at the BBC quite plainly didn’t think to bribe Orla Guerin to bring back a landmine from Afghanistan.

A missed opportunity, BBC! We could have been rid of the boorish Charley Boorman forever. However, in the case of the lovely Sue Perkins I am rather glad that all Orla Guerin brought back with her were some After Eight Mints and a tin of weird liquorice sweets that nobody in the office actually likes.

But the premise of the show got me thinking.

See, I have a Flip camera (or rather my wife does, but let’s not haggle over ownership issues). I have transport. An old green mountain bike.

And Leamington Spa has some of the most dangerous roads in the county.

I could make my own version of Dangerous Roads and kill off the celebrities of your choice. And I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t need a hooky landmine (only one previous careful owner) to do the dispatching for me – the local flora and fauna would do that without batting an eyelid.

Here’s a quick sneak-peak at the itinerary:

After staying at one of Leamington’s many fine B&B’s your chosen celebs would mount up (one perched precariously onto the handlebars) and embark on their final journey.

The first leg would see them navigating the gum chewing wilds of Bury Road who’s broadly curving cul-de-sacs and St. George’s flag festooned garden sheds have seen many a careless traveller lost to the world – both body and soul – and, if not buried under a patio somewhere, then (a fate equally worse) married off to some 16 year old who's managed to get pregnant at the merest whiff of Lynx deodorant and who’s knowledge of foul language would make Roy Chubby Brown blush.

After that the timorous celebs must then negotiate a safe route through the competing Chav kingdoms of the Kingsway and Queensway estates who’s Burberry lined pathways have caused many a seasoned explorer to go blind and start shopping at Gap. They will need to watch out for roaming packs of hoodies, skateboarders and secondary school drop-outs who smoke like chimneys and who look like they’ve had the faces of World War I veterans grafted onto their pre-pubescent little skulls. If these savages don’t pop a cap into the asses of our erstwhile celebs then their 14 year old mothers surely will.

Finally – the coup d'état (or, more fittingly, the coup de tete) – our beleaguered celebs, by now bemoaning their D list status and wishing they’d stayed working for hospital radio, must traverse the marauding Mad Max 3 wilderness of the Leamington Spa High Street late on a Friday night. Auntie Entity, Master-Blaster and that weird geeky guy who flies the plane and has the face of a camel... they are all here waiting for some unsuspecting ignoramus to venture too close to their fag stained clutches. Steer your bike too close to the cliff edge of alcoholism and you will plummet forever into the churning morass of the gutter far below and find yourself forever more a citizen of Bartertown. Or, as it is more commonly known around here, Battertown.

And there you go. Job done. Job’s a good ‘un.

Charley Boorman is a goner.

Easy-peasy.

So. Which celebs would you like to nominate?

Nerf Gas

Don’t mistake me. I hate those Nerf gun adverts on TV.

You know the ones. A group of all American teens (the wrong side of 16) who aren’t quite emotionally mature enough to dispense with the fantasy of being Bruce Willis in Die Hard, who rampage over an unbelievably clean urban landscape playing Nerf tag with their pump-action, fast loading Nerf guns and speaking like movie trailer voice-overs.

“You’re going down!”

“I’m locked and loaded!”

“Take that with my Nerf telescopic sniper rifle!”

“Eat foam Velcro-tipped dart, towel-head!”

Yeah. That kind of thing. I hate those adverts. Really hate them. And the kids in them. Nerdy jocks with too much testosterone but not enough to put away their toy guns and get themselves a proper girlfriend. They really get on my Nerfs.

So it was with much trepidation that we bought a couple of Nerf dart guns for the boys. The eldest was going to a Nerf dart tag party and hence had to be appropriately tooled up. So my wife, Karen, who’s knowledge of toy weaponry is worryingly superior to my own did the deed via Amazon and within a couple of days we were the proud owners of two gleaming green and orange pump action Nerf assault rifles.

The boys – including the youngest – have barely stopped playing with them.

It is disconcerting to see a 3 year old wearing eye goggles and operating the pump action on his Nerf gun like a ‘Nam vet. More worrying to discover that he got his eye in very quickly and, though is content to fire at everything and nothing most of the time, can still shoot the balls off a gnat when he wants to. Even the eldest boy – usually capable at missing a barn door whilst inside the barn – has discovered hitherto untapped reserves of accuracy.

The guns feel and look... er, good. They make the holder feel instantly macho and empowered. And I hate to say that. Because I like to think of myself as a pacific kind of guy. Not particularly marshal. But even I took great delight in bouncing a Nerf dart off the back of my wife’s head at 8 metres. It was a fine shot and took account of gravity and wind speed and the erratic movement of my target.

Technically it was friendly fire but, hey, with those credentials maybe I could get a job with the UN?

Joking aside though, I can’t help but see this affinity that we have with weaponry as deeply sad. And troubling. I’d like to put it down to the sportsman’s simple joy of launching an object through the air and hitting an aimed for target – a test of skill, accuracy and judgement.

But it isn’t, is it?

It’s about power and prowess and machismo. And even 3 year olds get it. Even when half an hour later they’re snuggled up in front of the TV watching Waybuloo.

It makes me feel like Sarah Connor’s son in Terminator 2 when he sees kids playing with guns in the desert and says, “We’re not going to make it, are we?”

‘Cos even if you don’t buy toy guns and toy swords for your kids they’ll go out and find an appropriately shaped stick and pretend one into being. What do you do? Place a limit on their imagination?

Denying our affinity for violence and aggressive is dangerous. The way I see it, it needs to be confronted. Marshalled, controlled, given a safe and constructive outlet.

And I guess this is where products like the Nerf guns come in. And believe me this is not an endorsement or a review – just my observations.

The darts are foam and relatively harmless. The guns come with protective goggles and vests. The vests have target areas on them. The competitive element has been ramped up rather than the murderous (though you can never expunge it completely).It’s just a game with a capital G.

So maybe those all American teens will grow up to be balanced individuals who channel their aggression into paint balling weekends or clay pigeon shooting precisely because they embraced their aggression in controlled play?

It’s certainly better that than them going on the rampage at a school or a town centre somewhere near you with an Uzi and a shotgun.

But ultimately, who knows?

I just feel like I have hypothetical blood on my hands this morning and it doesn’t feel too nice.

It’s Time To Kill Christmas

No, really it is.

She’s had her day. It’s time to move on. Christmas must die. And that goes for all this Happy New Year bollocks too.

You know how I know?

I came into work this morning (well, that’s enough in itself), took one look at the tin of Quality Street that some festively drunk work colleague had donated to the office and I didn’t fancy one at all. The thought of letting another chocolate morsel slip past my ruby red lips made me want to regurgitate my breakfast all over my keyboard.

And don’t get me started on the mince pies. They’re dotted around the office like land mines. Little scalloped crusts of Christmas codswallop. Poisonous pastries baked in the devil’s own arse.

But the real indicator that Christmas needs to be jerked off the nearest scaffold is the reaction engendered in me whenever anyone wishes me Happy New Year or (worse) asks me how my Christmas holiday had gone.

“Aaargh! Don’t ask me about my Christmas holiday! It was precious! Just between me and my family and I don’t want it sullied by having the experience aired in the scabby work environment where it will get cheapened by the buzz of the fax machine or a work colleague sobbing down the phone line to HR. Mind your own business, my Christmas break was mine, do you hear me? Mine! Not yours! Stop trying to finger it with your grubby little paws of perfunctory politeness and yes you may borrow my stapler.”

I have managed to gouge 2 inch deep claw marks in my ergonomically sound desk since my re-emersion into the work environment yesterday.

It does not bode well.

The sooner we can get on with mindlessly pressing our faces hard into the grey grindstone of normality and forget all this talk of goodwill and hope and the painful memories of freedom the better.

Because there is no point fooling ourselves. Christmas is just a holiday romance. It was never going to be forever. Sure she might wiggle her baubled boobies at you in December. Tell you that her Christmas milk shake is better than everybody else’s. She might gyrate her tinselled tush in your direction at the office party and invite you to pull your festive sleigh up to her bumper (baby) but she’s just a big prick tease.

Apart from a few present on the 25th she’s never going to deliver. She’s got no sense of longevity. She’s got commitment issues, Goddamnit. It ain’t you; it’s her. She needs her freedom. She needs to feel the wind beneath her wings or a hundred and one other clichéd excuses.

And I’ve heard them all before. Every sodding year.

Well, enough is enough. I can’t take it anymore, Christine Mas or whatever your real name is. If I can’t have you, then no-one can have you.

This is the end of the line. I’m sorry. I really am.

But it’s time for you to go down and stay down, bitch.

Click click.

It’s time to say goodbye.

I’m sorry. There is no other way.

Ka-blam!

Ahem.

Well, I don’t know about you lot but I feel better already.

Birk & Nagra

The screaming you heard over the weekend wasn’t the climax of a witch’s sabbat but the sound of my wife wrestling money out of my wallet to take us to see Burke And Hare at the local cinema...

I love going to the cinema but when times are tight it is usually the first luxury to fall by the wayside.

So was it money well spent?

On the whole I’d say yes. The film is a comedy in the Ealing vein but is also gritty and a mite grim. Difficult for it to be otherwise given the subject matter – dead bodies, corpses, anatomical science and murder (to be said with both r’s rolling furiously like in an episode of Taggart) – and the historical ending of the story leaves little room for it to mutate into a chick flick: William Burke was roundly hanged, dissected and his skeleton put on view for all to see in the Edinburgh University Museum. Apparently it is still there.

But comedy it was and by God it was a who’s who of British comedians. Practically everyone was there with the notable exceptions of Ricky Gervais and Jim Davidson. So there’s 2 reasons at least to go and see it. Almost the entire cast of Spaced appears in the film and there was even Ronnie Corbett to boot though Karen and I both think the tiny little chap is recovering from a stroke given his slightly slurred delivery of his lines... but then again he was playing a Scotsman so the slurring could have been entirely deliberate.

As for the all important eye candy... well, there’s little to appeal to the ladies. Much as I like Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis they are hardly a pair of Adonis’s (Adoni?) and having them waddle around dressed in the cast-offs from Oliver Twist is hardly going to boost their sex appeal. For the lads there was Isla Fisher who I’m sure debuted on our screens in Home & Away. What can I say? She’s pretty enough but does nothing for me. So little in fact Burke and Hare could have carted me off to the butcher’s slab and I wouldn’t have noticed. Possibly it’s a testament to how much I adored Spaced but Jessica Hynes did far more for me. Even though she spent much of the film spilling her impressive bosom into a bowl of porridge and cheap ale. I guess that says a lot about what floats my boat.

Hynes also has the best laugh-out-loud scene in the film – as she and her on-screen husband, Serkis, are rogering each other with a fury that would possibly cause a tsunami off the coast of Skye they come up with their master plan – to move away from murder and into funeral parlours (the reason being people bring their dead bodies to you rather you having to engineer them yourself: genius). To be honest if I was going at Jessica Hynes like a threshing machine on moonshine the last thing I’d be thinking about would be funeral parlours ...but if I were to have Andy Serkis’s rubber lips flapping over me like Mr Ed reciting the alphabet then thinking about funeral parlours might be a very welcome diversion.

Anyway, my opinion aside, the film was not well patronaged when Karen and I went to see it and much as I’d like to see the film get a wider audience for patriotic reasons I can see that its appeal is limited. I don’t think the humour or the accents will travel well. Which is a shame.

And as for the title of this post: Birk & Nagra are a well established firm of chemists in Leamington Spa and, because my mind works like that, they are all I can think of when I see the names Burke and Hare. Any other association between the 2 is purely coincidental. Ahem.

Squirrel Nutkin Must Die!

(Adopts 1940’s terribly proper BBC voice...)

People of Great Britain!

Your country is in peril!

Your country needs you to rally round, gird your loins and perform exemplary duties on behalf of your noble Prince, God save him.

Yes, the call has gone out by the glorious Prince of Wales to rid the land of the grey menace. Forget swine flu. Forget improper use of the expenses system by our doughty MPs. The grey squirrel is threatening the livelihoods of our most respectable landowners.

“The greys are doing immense and increasing damage to hardwoods all over the country and threaten to compromise all our efforts to restore native woodlands...” said the Prince in a beautifully crafted letter to the CLA (that’s Country Land and Business Association to lower class people of unprivileged education).

The Prince – ever mindful of ecological issues – also raised the point that “wiping them out” might be the only way to preserve the red squirrel – the native denizen of these shores who, if it could choose its own colour, would surely be true blue. God save the Queen!

A short advertisement for Izal toilet paper will now follow this broadcast...

*****

So there you have it. A call to arms by Prince Charles no less.

Now, having bought my own house which comes replete with its own humungous garden I am technically a landowner. I might be stretching the point slightly but I bet I could get it to stand up in a court of law.

So I’m taking it as read that by Royal Decree I have been granted license to kill. Admittedly license to kill only grey squirrels but there’s enough of them around that I could make it a full time job. I mean, let’s be clear. The Prince is not suggesting we merely pop one or two of them off. He’s suggesting we wipe out the lot of them. Genocide. Total eradication.

It’s rather a shocking clarion call from our fuddy-duddy Goon loving Prince.

But what I want to know it: is he going to put his money where his murderous mouth is?

Is he going to supply me with the arms to carry out this mission? Hand me an antique musket emblazoned with the Windsor family crest and a bag full of lead balls? Buy me an AK-47 from Ebay replete with newly minted Russian ammo? Or just park a lorry load of cyanide outside my front door where the kids can gain easy access to it?

‘Cos I’m really not fussy.

Hell, I’d even give it a go with a bow and arrow.

I mean this is Prince Charles asking after all. Future King of England and all that...

But I do have one small concern. Where does it all end?

I mean, we murder the grey squirrel today... fine. Do we butcher the mink tomorrow? Do we move onto flora after that – start napalming great swathes of Japanese knotweed and floating pennywort? Because they shouldn’t really be here in the UK either.

Where does it all end? Or, perhaps more pertinently, how far could it be taken?

Hmm.

Puritanism of any kind is never a good thing. It inevitably leads to bloodshed. Or am I just reading far too much into it?