A.D of SEA

I read that famines have brought down civilisations all the way back to the Natufians of Syria 14,000 years ago. How come it is still happening to us in the 21st century? Surely there has been time enough to find an answer?

Aeons ago a soothsayer in a Paris estaminet, made of animal skin no doubt, warned his fellow customers about climate change. “Mark my words,” he would have said, “the time will come when walking to Leeds will be out of the question. There will be water from Calais to Dover. So much of it we will call it Sea because we won’t be able to take our eyes off it.“

No doubt he persuaded them to hold back the future by human sacrifice.
Nothing changes. The soothsayer exercised his power by pretending he could control his surroundings and was prepared to shed blood to maintain power. The British Government is always ready to lay on really spectacular human sacrifices, which are now called wars, for no other reason than to “sit at the top table among nations”.

The Queen famously did not accept the crown to preside over a break up of the United Kingdom. True it was several monarchs ago that Royal Families started wars to maintain power. But as her great-grandfather George V demonstrated when he refused to rescue his cousin the Czar from the Bolsheviks, abandoning the Russian Royals to rape and death, a little human sacrifice within the family is permissible if it gives job security.

I will go further and bet the other punters in that estaminet all those aeons ago rushed to press packets of mastodon chops on the soothsayer to finance his research into the cause of climate change. But it would be a little chap in the corner, planning a Wakes week in Blackpool, who said, “Why don’t we invent boats?”

Back to the cowry shells for the soothsayer. But he won’t give up easily. When he is running out of mastodon chops he will make another announcement: “The time will come when there are neither mastodons left, nor dinosaurs, and the only pterodactyls will be in Zoos. Then the world will starve.”

Once more he will be showered with mastodon chops until one of Eve’s kids remembers how her mother used to tell her how nice an apple was and what interesting people you met when you ate one.
Think of me as the chap in the cap because I know what will make this world a much more peaceful and gentle planet to inhabit.

Uninvent TV, which teaches us violence, greed and what fun it is humiliating people.

In my non-violent childhood we took our lessons in life from the Saturday matinee and walks with Romany. I learned my gentlemanly ways by a passionate study of George Sanders. The “goodies” in our Westerns wore white hats; the “baddies” wore black ones and were always defeated. If people of opposing sexes got into bed together, they had to keep a foot on the floor.



DANGEROUS CUTTING

You need a license to wear a sporran. Under new legislation which has been introduced in Scotland people wearing any part of a protected animal need to obtain a licence. The laws have been drawn up to protect endangered species like badgers and otters, whose fur used to be favoured by sporran makers. Scotland News


A COLUMNAR SALUTE

To David Davis, that unique being, an MP of principle.

IN THE MIDST OF LIFE WE ARE IN DIET

More in wonder than in anger, a doctor I once had in Wales looked at my latest health tests and said, “I don’t know how with your life style you are so well.” And the nurse said, “That is easy, he bribes the lab staff.”

The doctor said I was a racing certainty for a heart attack. He was wrong there, as I discovered last week, but at the time I said I thought it a nice respectable way to go but I was worried that some interfering jackanapes would bring me back.

Should I, I mused, have DO NOT RESUSCITATE tattooed on my chest, provided I could find a tattooist who could spell resuscitate?

“What chest?” the nurse asked. And the doctor said, “I am never sure whether that is your stomach or a hernia.”

The nurse said, “Have it tattooed on your stomach, then you can have it in really big letters.” To which I replied that if she was at my death bed I would have no chance of getting a last word in.

Anyway, they told me about this scheme called a Living Will where in certain cases no one strives officiously to keep you alive. The doctor said the only snag was that you might collapse in the street and be leaped upon by someone who had just done a first aid course and was too polite to look in your wallet.

That really hit me where it hurt. I have this recurring nightmare that I find this diary and am just taking it to a police station when I am knocked over. A super efficient paramedic looks in the diary and pumps me full of Rhesus negative because that is what it says under personal memoranda in the diary I have just picked up.

That would be terrible, the doctor agreed. They would have killed the wrong man. I sometimes wondered if he had Irish blood. He certainly had a bitter turn of Gaelic wit, that doctor. "Don't sit down," he once said, “I don't want you dying in the surgery. Bad for the image.”

“Is it as bad as that?” I asked.

“Bad? Diabetic and eight stone overweight? I couldn't get better than evens on you getting home upright...."

He was he one who put on my records: “Growing old, disgracefully.”

ends