The unwanted sexual contact manager & Mr Beelzebub
The sound of The Red Flag floats out at indecent volume from the East Wing of Beelzebub Mansions. Mrs B. is toasting NuLabour's general election victory with vodka and caviar blinis while smashing her emptied glasses in the fireplace. No wonder GCHQ are tapping our phones.
I skulk in the deserted kennel block with my man Whittaker, sharing a plastic two-litre bottle of cheap white cider and a plate of Findus Crispy Pancakes. There are difficult times ahead and we'll need every penny when Mr Brown comes calling with the next lot of stonking great tax increases.
So, five more years then. Mr Blah's Turkey Army came up trumps and trooped to the polling stations to save their jobs. For how long remains to be seen.
As if to celebrate this opening of a new branch line for the gravy train, the usual suspects were piling into one of The Guardian's jobs supplements on Monday like fat birds in a free cake shop. One advert in particular caught my eye. Prepare yourselves.
“Big Fish Theatre, one of South London's most innovative young people's theatre companies, is looking for an experienced arts practitioner to manage a groundbreaking new project. The post holder will be responsible for developing and managing effective multi-arts programmes for young people in Southwark. Salary (35 hours) £29,000, free lentils and bike.”
And the job title? “Unwanted Sexual Contact Project Manager.” What? What???
What on earth is an Unwanted Sexual Contact Project Manager? And what has it got to do with art for young people? The mind boggles. Are you supposed to prevent Unwanted Sexual Contact? Instigate it? Film it? Draw it? What? Tony Hart must be spinning in his Vision On gallery.
(A quick art note. L.S.Lowry couldn't draw horses' legs, so he always hid them behind a wall. Rolf Harris can draw horses' legs, and very well too. Ergo, Rolf is a better artist than Lowry. I bet they didn't teach Prince Harry that when he didn't do his A-level.)
To be fair, this exciting new post isn't exactly a Turkey Army position, although I don't doubt that oodles of public money will be sloshing around the South London arts scene. The newly-appointed, £29,000-a-year Unwanted Sexual Contact Project Manager will be funded by the National Lottery.
So that's alright then. It's not taxpayers' money after all; it's just the poor people who'll be paying for it when they rush to the nearest Scrote Shop with their last pound, desperate for that scratchcard fix regardless of the fact that there's no microwave pizza or oven chips in the tower block fridge.
Closing date is June 1st. Good luck.
Of course, before you can get your children safely on board the public sector gravy train, it is necessary for them pass a few exams. Now even though they've been made so easy that only the feckless, the workshy, the terminally slow and the Welsh can possibly fail them, getting your kids into the right school seems to play on parents' minds an awful lot.
Which brings us to the case of Primrose and Scarlet Moore, innocent victims of a Jobsworth attitude that is quite breathtaking in its obduracy.
Primrose and Scarlet are four-year-old identical twins from Chelmsford in Essex. Their mother had assumed that they would both be able to attend the reception class at a new school just 10 minutes walk from their home. She had reckoned without the concrete-headed bureaucrats who sit behind computers in local council offices.
The Moore's home falls right on the edge of the school's catchment area and there is a limit of 30 places on offer. You know what's coming, don't you?
Primrose is offered a place because she is number 30; Scarlet, whose name comes second alphabetically, isn't. You really couldn't make it up. Their mother now faces the immense hassle of two different schools, two different uniforms, two different parents' evenings and perhaps even two different school years. And that's without considering the implications of splitting up identical twins.
It's pathetic. Whichever idiot is responsible for this decision deserves to be locked in a dark room with the newly-appointed and preferably priapic Unwanted Sexual Contact Project Manager for Southwark. When he's been without for a while.
So you've managed to get your child into a half-decent school and he or she still turns out to be so irredeemably stupid that they can't manage to accumulate the 15 marks out of 100 to pass one of Mr Blah's new Ezlite A-levels. That job for life counting paper clips for the civil service is receding into the distance. What do you do?
Don't despair. Buy a cat. Or two. It emerged this week that if your child's favourite pet expires on the day you are due to take an exam, his or her teacher can ask for an extra two per cent to be added to their marks. If old Tiddles turns up her toes the day before the exam, you can blag an extra one per cent.
And it gets better. A terminally-ill parent or recent family bereavement is worth an extra five per cent. (Shave your head, lose weight and hang around the school gates coughing a lot.) A severe car accident involving a parent or the death of a distant relative clocks up only four per cent.
And it gets better. A “broken limb on the mend” gets you two per cent, the same as a dead cat. A fresh break, however, ranks alongside a recent domestic crisis like a divorce or an organ disease at three per cent. An asthma attack or witnessing a distressing event on the day (step forward, the engorged Unwanted Sexual Contact Project Manager for Southwark) gets you three per cent. Hay-fever is worth only two per cent. A mere headache (you wimp) gets you another one per cent.
There are serious issues to consider here. For the purposes of comedic effect, I have specified a cat as the family pet. Yet the exam board guidelines are not so specific. And who is to argue that the life of a pet hamster or even a pet stick insect is worth less than the life of a pet cat? On this basis, the children of the Old Woman Who Swallowed A Fly would get an immediate double-first at Cambridge.
But even the leather-elbowed, talent-free zones who pass for teachers these days are unlikely to swallow that story. So here's the patented Bazza scenario guaranteed to get even slack-jawed, gum-chewing morons a decent pass. Gather round, children. Are you sitting comfortably?
Your parents are on the verge of divorce (3) when your Dad is diagnosed with cancer (5). Your Grandad drives over to take you to school, but being one of those ancient loons on the Trevor McDoughnut show the other night, runs over the cat (2) and then smashes into an HGV (4).
Meanwhile you run outside to see what all the noise is and trip and break your arm (3). While at the hospital you contract MRSA (3) and when you finally escape A&E to catch the bus to the exam hall, you're flashed at by the Unwanted Sexual Contact Project Manager for Southwark (3). The council are cutting the grass verges (as if!) which brings on hay-fever (2) and to be quite honest, all this aggravation has given you a bit of a headache (1).
Now by my calculations, that gives you 26 per cent which is worth an immediate A-grade in Maths or Physics and a clear pass in any other subject. Spell your name correctly on the paper and we're talking distinction time.
And let's face it. If all else fails you can always be a traffic warden.
Of course, it would help our woefully undereducated children if we didn't allow them to use that appalling “textspeak” when using their mobile phones.
I got a message last week that said “GR8 2 C U YDAY CU SN LOL”. Thinking it had come from some Burberry Ape who had mistakenly got my number, I replied in forthright – and four-letter – fashion.
Two minutes later my phone rang. It was my mother, the Dowager Lady Beelzebub of Miles Platting. I'd got her a mobile phone for Christmas and she was apparently taking the How To Text booklet that came with it very seriously indeed. Ho hum!