Not you. No, you stay right where you are but only if you want to.
I’m having a bad attack of being very desirous of flouting authority. How do you feel about it?
On the front of the paper, which arrived about eleven this morning, when, presumably, the newspaper boy could be arsed to drag himself out of bed
Arsed! Jane said arsed!
That’s not like her.
She’s flouting authority apparently.
What, like knocking over statues and what have you?
I don’t think so, let me read a bit more.
it said that the Prime minister was going to tell us to go shopping. For months and months he’s been telling us not to go shopping, and then, when we did, it was waiting in Tesco’s car park in the cold for up to an hour to find out there still were no toilet rolls.
It’s about toilet rolls.
Not again.
Apparently.
And now we’re supposed to go shopping just because he says so. Well go away. Right away. I have other things to worry about. I thought the doc had referred me to the surgeon five weeks ago. For five weeks I have kept a food diary, confident that I would get the call from the hospital soon. Turns out when I spoke to her yesterday, she hasn’t even written the letter yet. I rang the opticians, having had double vision since the OH hurled a bag of spanners at my eyeball in March. They won’t be open until Monday, expect a wait of two hours on the phone.
She can’t see and her guts are playing up.
That’ll be the toilet rolls. We need another in the loo, by the way.
Can’t you change a toilet roll?
Not my job.
Oh I am fed up. I can’t read, because of my eyes and I’ve spent a lot of the last three months sitting on the you know what with no toilet rolls. Apart from that I’m fine, still alive, limping slightly, metaphorically speaking. But I do understand people who wish to break out and haven’t taken kindly to being told what to do, even by a Prime minister who had it and survived. I empathise because of sixty-odd years of my mother.
Her hobby was telling people what to do. The height of her world expertise was only exceeded by the depths of her ignorance. I am still stuck, thirty three years later, with the peach-coloured bedroom carpet she advised me to have because she said I couldn’t have the blue I wanted, and was paying for, because it would fade. The peach I was advised to have faded to orange within a year, so I have had thirty two years of orange bedroom carpet that I never wanted, because of good advice.
So I completely understand if people are getting a bit arsey.
She’s at it again.
What?
Arses.
Are you sure this is a suitable thing to read before breakfast?
So whilst I understand iconoclasm as a major straw in the wind and would never advise destroying any art for a couple of hundred years, at least. because it takes that long to see it, my own response to the current situation is ‘go away’. We have all had enough of authority in any form, for whatever reason, especially authority applied destructively or randomly, and particularly any type of authority, that assumes we are all idiots. I know there are some idiots in society, I used to teach in deprived areas. But, in the main, people are fairly reasonable and will try to help or do the right thing if they can. But after three months of being told what to do, every day, breakouts against authority in every form, are the tip of the iceberg heading for the ship of state, faster than you think.
Moreover if the PM laughs while he is telling us to go shopping, just like my mother always used to laugh when she was happily running your life for you, there will be a stiff email in the ether to Downing Street nest week.
In between doctor’s appointments, optician’s appointments and only if I can be arsed.
That’s it, I’m not reading this any more.
Oh, it’s finished.
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Mooning.
There are seven arses in this column, can you spot them all?