As the 2017 party conference season draws to a close, the left will think that it won the battle of the summits.
Labour’s conference on the coast was larger, rallyish, and more upbeat that the Conservative meeting this year – although it was more of a carnival celebrating the central figure of the feast than a conventional political meeting.
But the Tory conference passed off well enough, with all of the much-puffed possibilities for upsets which occupied so much press time in the run-up to it evaporating on first contact with reality.
In terms of the biggest issue of our time, the party in the country at large is far more united on supporting Brexit and getting on with it than the outbursts from some among the parliamentary membership might imply.
Opportunities to make this point crystal clear were certainly not missed by the grassroots at drinks parties and in fringe meetings.
This is useful spine-stiffening stuff. Our media talks as if Brexit is tomorrow. We have time. David Davis’ calm and measured discussion of the negotiations, alongside Liam Fox’s optimism on the trade front, were the key Brexit takeaways in a process that still has years to run.
As far as leadership muttering goes, every party endures “noises off”, and nothing in the Tory environment rivals even for a moment the Labour vendettas of the Blair-Brown years.
The Tory consensus in Manchester was that Theresa May will see us through Brexit and beyond, and indeed the Prime Minister’s tenacity can only be admired.
She battled through her speech with a challenging cough, her perseverance and humanity being the antithesis of the “maybot” she is said to be – something that the public will see is to her credit. Teflon Theresa marches on.
I'd be even more impressed if Alex managed to keep a straight face while writing that. If that was me, I'd have ended up involuntarily spraying coffee out of my nose all over the keyboard.
Alex Deane is a way better satirist than the joker who handed May a P45 mid-speech. Respect.
We Brits never tire of reminding ourselves that we're world leaders in having a sense of humour and we've now even got something called "the Gold TV Comedy Audit" to remind us of our past national triumphs in hilarity, as the Express revealed earlier this year:
“DON’T tell him, Pike!” and “I know nuh-thing” are among Britain’s favourite comedy oneliners, critics have revealed.
The classic Dad’s Army line – uttered by Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe) after Ian Lavender’s gormless Private Pike has been asked for his name by a German prisoner – topped a list of iconic gags from hit shows like Blackadder, Fawlty Towers and Absolutely Fabulous.
It was a pretty funny line back in the day but it feels as if, somewhere along the way, we've forgotten why it was so funny.
The joke works on at least three levels. First, Captain Mainwaring contradicting the whole point of his own order was a witty, compact logical absurdity, in the paradoxical tradition of Lewis Carroll's word games. Second, it's part of a comedy of manners - if this was just some random character slipping up on a metaphorical banana skin it would have been slightly amusing verbal slapstick, but it became properly funny because of the pomposity and self-importance of the character who was falling flat on his face. But the slapstick element of the situation also worked in its own terms, too - watching people bumbling about and doing something really badly can be genuinely hilarious in itself, which is why fail memes are a thing.
The thing is, on any of those three levels, the joke is only funny because we, the audience, can see the absurdity of the situation. The characters on the other side of the fourth wall are oblivious to their own logical inconsistencies, character quirks and ineptitude. The writers, actors and audience are sharing a joke at the expense of the characters. Admittedly, in this case, it's quite a gentle joke - Dad's Army was always about affectionate mockery - with the possible exception of all-purpose killjoy Warden Hodges, most of the characters were essentially likeable, if very silly. But it's only funny because we have a sense of the ridiculous which is lost on the characters.
We've been exposed to this sort of comedy for so long that you'd think that nobody on these islands could fall into the trap of parroting logical absurdities, getting puffed up with self-importance, or making a chaotic hash of things without some memory from Dad's Army, or Blackadder, or Fawlty Towers, or Python, or whatever, popping into mind and prompting some thought along the lines of "Hang on, this is just getting silly." But no, at least for influential people making some of the most important decisions in our national life, there is no fourth wall. Our chief Brexit negotiator, David Davis, isn't watching Captain Mainwairing and laughing at him. He is Captain Mainwaring, blissfully unaware of his own logical inconsistencies, pompous bluster and incompetence...
...or maybe, as Cliff Taylor has suggested, he's channelling Blackadder's cheerful, but turnip-brained, sidekick, Baldrick:
If there is a cunning British plan in the background here it is being particularly well concealed. Britain’s Brexit secretary David Davis said “creative ambiguity” was needed during a negotiation and that London could not show all its hand. But this looks more like Blackadder than Machiavelli.
London must know that the rest of the EU will not allow it to simultaneously leave the EU, retain the benefits of free trade within Europe and also be able to negotiate new trade deals with other countries such as the US, Latin American and Asian countries and so on.
In political terms this is firmly in the cake-possession-and-eating department. In economic terms, the key problem is that Britain wants to trade freely and without barriers with the EU, while at the same time striking its own trade deals with other countries.
Even when the mockery is affectionate, you're supposed to laugh at these characters, not become them. It's kind of the point of comedy. If you don't get that, you're suffering from a sense of humour failure that leads to some very dark places indeed, as the consistently excellent Flipchart Rick has just pointed out:
I said years ago that if we ever had an authoritarian movement in Britain it would not have uniforms, goose-stepping marches and torchlight parades. It wouldn’t be that interesting. Ours would be a shabby poujadism, led by golf club bores, residents’ association busybodies and parish Pol Pots.
The boorish self-righteous know-all is a staple of British comedy, perhaps because every neighbourhood has at least one. It’s easy to imagine Terry Medford, Martin Bryce, Warden Hodges and Reggie Perrin’s brother-in-law Jimmy in your local UKIP branch. Basil Fawlty would have joined in the early years but left once they started letting in riffraff like Eddie Booth and Alf Garnett. But at least in the comedies even the most dislikable characters had some redeeming features and, in the end, they usually got their comeuppance, their own puffed-up stupidity eventually bringing about their downfall.
Alas, in 2017, this once-ridiculed tendency in our national culture is now calling the shots. As Rafael Behr said last week, to the rest of the world, Britain now looks urbane but unhinged. Sitcom characters, only without the comedy...
Because ... well, why wouldn't you ... I'm posting a valedictory Victoria Wood vid, like every other right-thinking person on the Internet. I've not chosen this one because it's one of her best - far from it. She was much, much better with pieces that combined her flawless ear for language with that very specific brand of deadpan northern bathos that she could do like almost nobody else (except for Alan Bennett; both of them created wonderful worlds where people naturally spoke in phrases like "the penultimate macaroon" or "This was in the middle of a wedding, so she's spitting tuna vol-au-vents at me").
No, the main reason I plumped for this one is that you can't write a song with a chorus that starts "Ann Widdecome" without reminding people (at least ones like me) of the "Blame Canada" song from the old South Park movie - the bizarre mental pairing of these two completely different comedy worlds just me made me smile.
A short time ago, somebody gave me a back-handed complement. The somebody in question was one Lucy Bostick, a Ukip activist from Essex, who failed to get elected as a County Councillor for the Chigwell and Loughton Broadway district in 2013. I'd mentioned her name in an old post because, in a Ukip election leaflet that had been stuffed through my door in the 2014 European elections, she was quoted as saying that a proposed financial transactions tax would decimate the City of London, to which I added the comment, "Ukip's Lucy Bostick says 'decimating the City' like it was a bad thing."
Anyway, Ms Bostick recently contacted me, via the comments section of this blog,* with the following request:
I can't see a means of contacting you so I'm posting here. I'd like to ask you to remove or edit an old post in which you have included me. Please could you contact me so I can send you full details of my request? Many thanks.
Still, it's always good to know that I'm not just shouting into the void, or getting a very occasional nod of agreement from somebody else living inside the same filter bubble as me.
Since Ms Bostick has been kind enough to take notice of me, I thought it would be rude not to find out a bit about her. A quick Google session doesn't turn up a lot - it's not like I've hit the big time and annoyed a well-known Ukip figure - but she does rate the odd mention in the press. Most of the coverage comes from the time when she was hit by the shrapnel from an explosive rant from one of Ukip's more flamboyant ex-general election candidates, Kerry Smith:
Kerry Smith, the candidate for the top target seat of South Basildon and East Thurrock, is said to have mocked gay party members as “poofters”, joked about shooting people from Chigwell in a “peasant hunt" and referred to someone as a “Chinky bird”...
... Mr Smith is also said to have mocked Lucy Bostick, a Ukip activist in Chigwell, for printing "boring c**p" on her leaflets.
According to the transcripts, he said: "This is Chigwell. If she was doing a survey in Chigwell the question should be 'Do you oppose the EU banning the use of lead in shotguns as that way you can shoot more peasants coming from Chigwell? 'Do you support a peasant's hunt through Chigwell village?"
Madness...? [shouting] THIS IS CHIGWELL!
I was intrigued enough to find out what manner of leaflet had attracted the scorn of the forthright Mr Smith, so I checked out a copy of Ms Bostick 's old election leaflet on t' Internet (I'm not reproducing any of it for obvious reasons, but there is a link to a .pdf here at the time of writing - don't be surprised to find it broken if it subsequently gets removed for image management reasons).
Well, the look and feel of the leaflet is a tad more slick and professional than the 2014 Euro election leaflet Ukip sent me, which looked as if it had been slapped together by the people responsible for those attention-grabbing urgent-definitely-not-a-circular junk mail envelopes designed to con the gullible and greedy into imagining they're about to win a few thousand in some fictional prize draw they never entered.
Does the content live down to Mr Smith's "boring c**p" jibe? Overall, no more than many local election leaflets, I'd say. We learned that Ms Bostick was for local referendums on planning issues, keeping police stations open and street lights on, being transparent and accountable and putting local residents first. She was apparently against high council taxes and profligate spending decisions. A bit platitudinous (see Hoggart's Law), but not outstandingly so and saner than Kerry Smith's prescription drug-fuelled rants.
But this is Ukip, so there's always going to be something a bit weird going on and, sure enough, it's right there on the title page. After saying a rhetorical "YES" to planning referendums, open police stations and switched-on street lights, Lucy Bostick comes out with this conceptual car crash of mixed messages:
"YES to celebrating our rich cultural diversity and Christian, Anglo-Saxon heritage"
OK, so you're into celebrating cultural diversity AND sectarian, nativist identity politics? Any thinking person who paused to decode this values statement would realise that the contradictory ideas packed into the slogan more or less cancel one another out, although I'm guessing that thinking people weren't the target audience here. I'm not going to unpick all the elements of this oxymoronic mess, but one bit stands out as being especially odd. Anglo-Saxon? What's that all about?
Taken literally, it's just plain bizarre. I know that many Ukip supporters want to go back to the 1950s, when they were youngsters and, regressive as it is, nostalgia for lost youth is at least understandable. But going back to the early Middle Ages? Interesting though characters like King Alfred and Hereward the Wake might be, it's hard to see how they're relevant to electing a local representative charged with overseeing issues like the optimal placement of pedestrian crossings in Chigwell. It's also hard to reconcile this Anglo-Saxon trope with the party's name - it's supposed to be the UK Independence Party, not the English Independence Party ("Celts and Picts only welcome if they're prepared to assimilate?" - good luck selling that message in the rest of the UK).
Or is "Anglo-Saxon" just code for something else? There are various other things it might mean. Not being a mind-reader, I can't say for sure what Ms Bostick intended, but she might, for example, be referring to this:
The Anglo-Saxon model or Anglo-Saxon capitalism ... is a capitalist model that emerged in the 1970s, based on the Chicago school of economics. However, its origins date to the 18th century in the United Kingdom under the ideas of the classical economist Adam Smith.
Characteristics of this model include levels of regulation and taxes being low, and the public sector providing fewer services. It can also mean strong property rights, contract enforcement, and overall ease of doing business as well as low barriers to free trade.
Well, that would be Thatcherite enough for Ukip, although that sort of reference to the high level ideology of political economy sounds a tad out of place in an election leaflet from a wannabe councillor in Chigwell.
Looked at on the map, UKIP's "heartland" looks like the Anglo-Saxon territories around the middle of the 6th century, before the expansion into Mercia and Northumbria. This might appear like an amusing coincidence, but I think it actually highlights some important points about the nature of UKIP's support and thus their prospects...
...UKIP's support in the South East is quite peripheral, hugging the more economically marginal coastal counties. They look like a party that will do well in seaside towns rather than the commuter belt (and who could deny that Nigel Farage looks like the sort of chap you'd bump into at Brighton Racecourse)...
... the coastal bias reflects a disproportionate level of support among older voters. This perhaps explains the one exception to the Anglo-Saxon focus in terms of seats won, namely Cornwall, which I suspect may reflect support among retirees from elsewhere rather than a sudden upsurge in English nationalism. However, UKIP aren't picking up pensioner votes in particular. Indeed, the sweet spot appears to be people in their 50s and, to judge from the analysis of the Eastleigh Parliamentary by-election ... and other polling, the less well-off. This indicates that the party's appeal is to the economically vulnerable.
But this approximate coincidence between the 6th Century Anglo-Saxon lands and economically marginal areas in the 21st Century South East of England sounds a bit esoteric for a local election leaflet. Of course, Anglo-Saxon could also be shorthand for something else:
An ethnic nationalist might believe, for example, that what makes a person British is the supposed purity of their descent from the Anglo-Saxons (which in practice usually means “being white”).
Maybe there was no intention here to use "Anglo-Saxon" as a synonym for "white", but the use of such terminology is, at the very least, unwise, given the well-known attitudes some of the more unsavoury characters who self-identify as Ukip supporters.
*Post updated and corrected at this point - I'd originally quoted from a post allegedly written by Alex Wood on the Ukip Voices blog which was adorned with official-looking Ukip party branding, but turns out to have been a fake blog created by some troll, so it's no longer appropriate to quote it as an example of the more extreme views prevalent among Ukip supporters (Kerry Smith's public statements will have to suffice to illustrate that point - see Poe's Law). This doesn't change my subsequent point that Ukip's reputation is far more damaged by the stuff their supporters (real and fake) come out with than by anything critics like me could write.*
So, if you happen to be reading this, Lucy Bostick, or any other Ukip activist who thinks that trying to shut critical voices up is a good use of your time, perhaps you'd be better occupied having a quiet word with the fruitcakes, loonies closet racists and trolls, whose real or fake support for your party does it far more reputational damage than anything your critics might say. Oh, and drop the Anglo-Saxon thing. It only encourages them.
*Her comment was attached to a completely unrelated post, presumably in an attempt not to draw attention the original post in which she got a mention and whatever it was about it that she objected to.
When members of the Chinese establishment get upset at being mocked,
they task the State Administration for Press, Publication, Radio, Film
and Television with delivering some stupidly impossible target like stopping everybody in China from making puns.
This
can only be part of a deliberate media strategy - instead of ordering
somebody else to ban puns, members of the British establishment* are clearly trying
to break satire itself by putting themselves beyond parody.
At this rate, I give the satirists of The Daily Mash, Have I Got News for You and The News Quiz six months before competition from the real home lives of the rich and famous puts them out of business.
Hey, Boris, I think you missed at bit. Look at this great big spill over here:
And this [the regulatory failure that caused the global financial crisis of 2008] was a matter, first, of dogma - they [Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke] are just horrifically opposed to anything regulatory, but it is also the international competition in laxity. The race to the bottom between the United States and the United Kingdom, the City of London in particular, and the City of London won that race to the bottom. But it meant that all regulation in the West was completely degraded in this stupid competition to see who could have the weakest regulation...
...What do we need to do, what can we do, in all of this? We need to change the perverse incentive structures that produce these recurrent epidemics of accounting control fraud that are driving our crises. So we have to first get rid of the systemically dangerous institutions. These are the so-called "too big to fail" institutions. We need to shrink them to the point, within the next five years, that they no longer pose a systemic risk. Right now, they are ticking time bombs that will cause a global crisis as soon as the next one fails. Not if, when.
Second thing we need to do is completely reform modern executive professional compensation, which is what they used to suborn the appraisers, remember they were pressuring the appraisers through the compensation system, trying to produce what we call a Gresham's Dynamic, in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the marketplace, and they largely succeeded, which is how the fraud became endemic.
And the third thing that we need to do, is to deal with what we call the three "Ds"; deregulation, de-supervision and the de facto decriminalisation.
Because we can make all three of these changes and if we do so, we can dramatically reduce how often we have a crisis and how severe these crises are.
Bill Black, helpfully pointing out the huge mess left by BoJo's chums in the City and suggesting where he and his chums could usefully put their mop, broom, dustpan, J Cloth, sponge or other hilarious metaphor to work, should they be remotely interested in doing a proper cleaning job.
...if what got us all this debt in the first place was a "too big to fail" banking system that was bailed out at taxpayer expense, you would expect the government to make sure that we don't "simply try and rebuild the same type of economy we had before the crash", as the prime minister put it in his speech. But of course, quite the opposite has happened. The government has deliberately stoked another London-centred housing bubble just in time for re-election using a right to buy scheme that basically gives anyone that qualifies their own personal Fannie and Freddie mortgage guarantee. Meanwhile, British banks are bigger than ever and are expected to grow bigger still.
When the cleaning contract goes out to tender in 2015, we need a better team of sanitation operatives, because this lot are useless. Let's just hope we don't have a major spill before then.
Two reasons for being the millionth person to post this clip of the Godfrey "Slapper" Bloom meltdown.
1. Because it's hilarious.
2. Because, having slept on it, I think I've worked out what Bloom was trying to do here. He's a politician with strong beliefs about how the world works, used to thinking tactically about getting his message across. What's happening here probably isn't an outbreak of pure insanity (although it must have looked like it to ordinary people like those guys in construction helmets and hi-viz jackets who give the camera a cheeky wave about 35 seconds in). I think it's a case of misjudged tactics and a head-on collision between preconceived beliefs and hard reality.
Ukippers believe, (and I know this, because they say it loudly and often), that the "liberal establishment" are trying to close down debate about their pet subject, immigration, by using the word 'racist.' Bloom is operating with this preconceived belief. So, when he's "attacked" (i.e. questioned) by a journalist, he tries to do something clever. Those devious liberals are always using the "r" word to shut people like him up, so he'll turn the tables on them by using the same magic word to shut his opponent up. Like a wily Kung Fu master, he will use his opponent's own strength to defeat him. This cunning plan turns out to be a tactical error.
He's so convinced the that the '"r" word is nothing more than a talismanic "get out of jail free" card that people just brandish to win any debate that he's become oblivious to the concept that the word actually has a specific meaning. So he just throws it at Michael Crick, without a moment's pause to consider how bizarre it sounds in the context of defending the sea of white faces adorning the Ukip conference brochure.
He then tries to bluster it out and take control of the interview by using the power of anger, which might have worked if his pomposity hadn't got the better of him ('How dare you!' was almost the worst thing he could have said at this point in the interview, although if he'd gone for 'How very dare you!,' the fail would have been perfect).
Once he'd gone that far, there was clearly no way back and slapping the reporter with a copy of the whites-only conference brochure was probably as good a way to go as anything else he could have done.
I don't think I've seen a full-on comedy meltdown done better since Basil Fawlty hung up his tweed jacket. An instant classic.
... then taking it out again. I'm worried that this cunning plan might already have been mocked to death. Which is a pity, because a "stay at home, we're rubbish" advertising campaign would give the people already living here a much-needed good laugh.
If they really wanted to keep the Transylvanian hordes away, the bigot whisperers should base their campaign on this Daily Mash parody of the British Citizenship test. If you thought that satire was obsolete, just remember that Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer are still making new episodes of the bizarrely popular Location, Location, Location, instead of being hunted down like dogs by the people who've finally realised the irreparable damage that unrestrained property speculation has done to the British economy and British TV schedules, then think again.
... and his face painted with gay cabalistic symbols, six foot eight
seventeen stone police sergeant Geoff Bull looked jolly convincing as he
sweated and grunted through a vigorous twist routine at the Frug À
Go-Go bierkeller. His hot serge trousers flapped wildly over his enormous plastic sandals
as he jumped and jumped and gyrated towards a long-haired man.
'Uh, excuse me, man, I have reason to believe you can turn me on.'
Friday night is music night, so here are the Bonzos with one of Vivian Stanshall's finest exercises in inspired gibberish:
Correction - it's not only David Cameron and that weird little fecker, Michael Gove, who are now jumping to Jeremy Hunt's defence. Hunt also has the endorsement of that splendidly fogeyish eccentric old Etonian, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who condemned Ed Miliband's rush to judge Hunt with this wonderfully patrician interjection:
Only a
socialist yahoo would make up his mind in 23 minutes.
On a slightly more serious note, the pairing of Gove and Rees-Mogg is a great example of how we Brits are conditioned to internalise class divisions. Without thinking, I automatically, and prejudicially, described Gove (educated at a state school, before winning a scholarship to the independent Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen) as a 'weird little fecker' whereas the silver-spoon-fed old Etonian Rees-Mogg got away with the almost complimentary 'eccentric'. It just goes to show how even somebody on the left can absorb an almost unconscious bias in favour of the overclass.
After all, to be fair to Michael Gove, that scholarship proves that he actually worked hard and pulled himself up by his own bootstraps at some point in his life, as opposed to being too impeccably well-bred to do anything so irredeemably vulgar as working hard for his influential place in society. Yet it's easy to describe his oddball nature as 'weird' and just as easy to use the almost affectionate label 'eccentric' to descibe the oddities of an over-privileged, heiress-marrying toff who seems to have bumbled into the House of Commons after taking a wrong turning on his way to Bertie Wooster's Drones Club.
It's a strange, strained relationship we have with our great British eccentrics - under the laughter there's also deep anxiety about status and position - think back to the desperately, hilariously insecure snobbery of a Basil Fawlty, or the anxieties and conflicts behind Vivian Stanshall's comic alter ego, Sir Henry Rawlinson:
I guess, "call me Dave" Cameron and his chums must be experiencing similar, but opposite, conflicts as they attempt to mimic the mores of ordinary folk - and wincing, every time Jacob Rees-Mogg lets the mask slip by opening his mouth.
I don't want to go all Stephen Fry on you, but I really love the word "splendid." It's so ... er ... splendidly un-hip and avuncular. So I, for one, welcome the advent of Professor Elemental's rather good single of the same name:
You are, no doubt, already aware of the result of the good Professor's rap duel with Mr B, The Gentleman Rhymer, but in the unlikely event that you have recently been detained in the wilds of Borneo, here's Fighting Trousers, another tutorial in advanced silliness from the superbly-named album The Indifference Engine:
If your regular dose of The Daily Mash still leaves you hungry for even more topical satire, may I recommend News Thump? Worth a look for the headlines alone, I'd say. Here are some recent classics:
What's the difference between a dead cat on a motorway and a dead banker on a motorway?
There are skid marks around the cat!
Says Vince Cable, who seems to have two jobs. Wearing his Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills hat, he's only allowed to utter anodyne half-truths and unconvincing defences of policies he formerly opposed. But he's got another hat, with bells on, for playing the fool. As the world in general knows, it's the fool's privilege to say the unsayable:
In Renaissance times, aristocratic households in Britain employed licensed fools or jesters, who sometimes dressed as other servants were dressed, but generally wore a motley (i.e. parti-coloured) coat, hood with ass's (i.e. donkey) ears or a red-flannel coxcomb and bells. Regarded as pets or mascots, they served not simply to amuse but to criticise their master or mistress and their guests.
The report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is out on what caused the 2008 economic crash and the current Great Recession. Although the commission is not unanimous ... the report says that the crash was foreseeable and preventable.
The report by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission draws on more than 700 interviews, millions of e-mail exchanges and other records that have not previously been disclosed....
The report examined the risky mortgage loans that helped build the housing bubble; the packaging of those loans into exotic securities that were sold to investors; and the heedless placement of giant bets on those investments.
Enabling those developments, the panel found, were a bias toward deregulation by government officials, and mismanagement by financiers who failed to perceive the risks.
Via. I don't care if it takes a 633 page report or a just a tasteless quip to remind us, so long as we never forget exactly who triggered this crisis. After all, the people being asked to take the pain - public sector workers, the unemployed, students, workers clinging on to insecure, unsatisfactory jobs with eroding benefits, ordinary people whose public services are being dismantled - don't share the blame. And that's no joke.
We're clowns - take us seriously and have a laugh with us.
Said Fips the clown, an interviewee on tonight's PM programme on Radio 4.
Fips and his fellow slapstick professionals are apparently upset by the Halloween "Carnival of Screams" attraction at Alton Towers which features, among other Halloween ghouls, scary clowns lurking in the horror maze. The Register helpfully picks up the story and runs with it, with further Fips quotes:
It's very unfair to portray us as evil. I have always been a clown, I have grown up around clowns, my father and my grandfather were clowns and we are not evil... I think the attraction will make people view us in the wrong sort of light. It could even have a knock-on effect - once children have got it into their heads that clowns are evil and scary, it stays with them and it makes our job a lot, lot harder.
I don't know if clowns will frighten the punters at Alton Towers, but by Godthey frightenme!
No yearly round robin letter from me - just a blog about anything odd, entertaining, surprising or interesting enough to share with friends, family and other sentient lifeforms.
Also contains witterings about politics, society and the economy (mainly from the socially liberal/left quadrant of the political compass), along with a bit of marvelling in stunned disbelief at religion, Brexit and other odd belief systems.
I am not really called Robin, nor have I ever been.
Occasional tweets at twitter.com/2primates
I'd be even more impressed if Alex managed to keep a straight face while writing that. If that was me, I'd have ended up involuntarily spraying coffee out of my nose all over the keyboard.
