Fear and Loathing on Sodor

Psalm 2:11-12 - Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling.

I’ve not been doing a great deal of reading lately, except for bedtime stories. Reading bedtime stories to a child is generally a delight, not a chore (at least up to the moment when you realise that the child’s enthusiasm for one more story has precisely nothing to do with or the merits of the book being waved under your nose, or the skill of your storytelling, but everything to do with postponing bed time). So when junior acquired a book of stories about Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends, I was quite happy.

Thomas the Tank Engine was part of my childhood – as well as some books, I had a couple of records of the train stories (voiced, by Johnny Morris, the man who used to give animals “amusing” voices in Animal Magic, a BBC programme for which I had an inexplicable fondness as a small child). Nostalgic, innocent, wholesome, full of steam trains – what could be more splendid?

Unexpectedly, The Adventures of Thomas has become my least favourite bedtime reading. The main thing I dislike about the current stories is how much the railway network on Sodor resembles a dysfunctional society or workplace. For much of the time, the engines are insecure, anxious, harassed, stressed, thin-skinned, dependent, competitive and jealous. They puff around in mortal fear of being replaced or demoted, desperately trying to please the all-powerful Fat Controller. It’s like watching the baby executives on the The Apprentice jumping through hoops in their pitiful attempts to catch the eye of Alan Sugar, replete from gorging on his power-breakfast. The stories are, I think, intended to be very moral, but the lessons to be drawn from them seem rather limiting – don’t get ideas above your station (that pun was as inevitable as it was terrible), but do respect and fear authority figures.

Children’s stories shouldn’t have a big, clunking, moral, although they can painlessly teach some valuable lessons and ideas about life. These stories have what I see as an anti-moral – a perfect recipe for how not to grow as a human being. Live in fear, respect hierarchies, obey orders without question, don’t have autonomy, don’t question authority, don’t think independently, never be proud of what you’ve achieved, just let your life run on the rails prepared for you by a higher authority.

Years ago, when I read Will Self’s My Idea of Fun, a violent, hallucinatory novel featuring a demented marketing consultant and serial killer whose grotesque mind is moulded by the (imaginary?) influence of a figure called The Fat Controller, I wondered what it was about the Thomas the Tank Engine stories that got Will so worked up. Maybe it was just a piece of calculated gonzo-style outrage from the man famous for doing heroin on John Major’s jet during the 1997 election campaign. But now I’m beginning to see the dark side of Reverend Awdry’s jealous God for myself.

Barbecue of the Vanities

Senior cabinet ministers are privately discussing a plan to scrap the Government's £5bn identity cards programme as part of cuts to public spending, The Independent has learnt.

The ministers believe that some "sacred cows" will have to be sacrificed in the effort to reduce Britain's debt mountain. They are raising fresh questions over the future of the ID card programme as the Cabinet faces renewed pressure to find economies beyond a promised £9bn in "efficiency savings".

According to this article in The Independent, maybe there's a silver lining to the huge cloud of debt currently hovering over the country. I'd crack open a bottle to celebrate this particular sacred cow being tossed onto the barbie (but not before checking that the Home Office haven't simply dropped the cards and adopted Blunkett's cunning plan to retain the ID database and make us all buy compulsory biometric passports).

Meanwhile, in local news, I've reluctantly had to abandon the compellingly surreal idea that Milton Keynes might really acquire a 50 metre long cow-based transgender sphinx. My - admittedly cursory - googling of Alex Wells has failed to come up with any hint that she's produced any previous sculptural works and I'm having to face the probability that I've been April fooled (even though the article was datelined April 16th). D'oh! And I so wanted it to be true...

Weed crazy

Walking and driving around this weekend, I've noticed that dandelions are everywhere, spreading like ... well, weeds. I've also been struck by how cheerful the grass verges around town look in the sunshine, lush and dotted with sprays of brilliant yellow dandelions and white dasies. They may be weeds, but, for a brief period they can be as much of a treat to the eye as may blossom. Dandelions have one other rather wonderful incarnation - the sight of a meadow at twilight dotted with the ghostly globes of dandelion clocks, a few seeds drifing on the hint of a breeze and catching the slanting rays of the setting sun, can be quite magical.

Having said that, the dandelions currently attempting to put down tenacious roots down in our garden will be exterminated without mercy, as soon as we get round to it.

Comfort eating

Contemplating those zillions of pound of debt could make a person very depressed. Time to raid the fridge, I think...

Ignoring the budget

I've not been following the "serious" coverage of Darling's latest bodge-it. I'm frightened that closer examination would just reveal that he's still way out of his depth. I don't imagine he's any more clueless than Her Majesty's opposition, or most of the other people who entirely failed to see this coming, but I'm getting the distinct impression that he's not ahead of the curve.

There seems to be a general consensus that Vince Cable is the man with a plan, or at least some grasp of what's gone so wrong and what to do about it - but, of course, he's light years away from the levers of power. I've just looked at an interesting review of Cable's book about the crisis, The Storm, (along with Philip Augar's Chasing Alpha, another post-mortem of financial doomsday), which ends with these (now) chilling words:

In a speech at Mansion House in 2004, Gordon Brown bellowed to an audience of bankers: “What you have achieved for the financial services sector, we as a country now aspire to achieve for the whole of the British economy.” The British will be living with that achievement for years.

You can read the whole review here. I'm almost tempted to read Cables's book itself, but who am I kidding? I can't even defeat the slugs or ants or whatever the beasties are that have eaten half the veg we've planted this year (despite having conscientiously thrown old coffee grounds and crushed eggshells on the ground around the tender young plants - supposedly a sure-fire slug deterrent). When I understand garden pests, maybe I'll move on to trying to understand the meltdown of the global financial system and how we all got to be a zillion pound in debt...

Like a late snowfall

Here are some pictures of blossom lying on the steps leading to North Willen Lake and the Peace Pagoda, Milton Keynes, yesterday.

Revelation

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in Roundabout City
A shape with cow body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Grow shadows of the trees in Campbell Park.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Milton Keynes to be born?

Alex Wells is planning to build a sphinx in Milton Keynes, according to an article published in the Milton Keynes Citizen (not on the first of April). A 50 metre long, 18 metre high sphinx. With the head of Jock Campbell and the body of a concrete cow. What can this rough beast portend but the coming of the End Times?