Modern Times

We dont go into town much these days, maybe once a month. On one of our trips the other day, it took just a couple of hours to see how the country has changed in the last few years. OK. So the BBC is forever filling our heads with the heart-tugging news that many parents on benefits have to do without food in order to feed their children. On our trip through the city, the bus passed through an area where a high percentage of residents are on benefit. Then it went through a more affluent area, where I would class the people as quite well to do. The mothers, waiting for their kids outside the school in the posh area were all as thin as rakes. The crowd outside the school in the poor area were all big fat women, smoking cigarettes. Not a BBC camera in sight. More heartbreak in town. Theres this Romanian Gypsy woman selling The Big Issue a job reserved for the penniless homeless. When she opened her mouth, the inside of her head was a solid mass of gold teeth. Call me naive, but I dont get it. Where does she get the gold to buy the gold? And why does she come so far from home to be homeless? Its not over yet. A woman on an invalid trike comes hurtling through Hamlyns toy store and runs aground on a carpet. Before anyone can help, she leaps off the contraption, skips round the back, yanks the machine clear, bends down, snatches up the carpet and flings it aside, with a cry of, That has no right to be lying there! Then she leaps on the trike and zooms away, leaving the heap carpet for the teeming masses to trip over... Outside the store, one of these No Win No Fee creatures has set up a stall, yelling, Have you had an accident that wasnt your fault? Cant help wondering if the carpet-trap woman is an accomplice.

And Yesteryear
Ever since the Jimmy Savile fiasco, every bloke over the age of 60, with a few bob in the bank, is awaiting that knock on the door before they march him off to the local nick and accuse him of being a sexual predator. I dont know if these blokes are innocent or guilty. To be honest, I dont care. But I do know that values were different in the 1960s and 70s. I am also convinced that, given their heads, the PC witch-hunters wont rest until they have disinterred Lewis Carol for being a paedo; then reburied him in unconsecrated ground, before burning all known copies of Alice in Wonderland. When I say that values were different way back then, I mean attitudes to sex. I remember the 1960s when they granted independence to one of the smaller African countries. The Brits sent out a team of civil

servants to observe the new regimes method of administering justice. A guide met them and assured them that his government handled the process of law in exactly the same way as they did back in the UK. Then he took them to a courtroom to see justice in action. The trial was going well, and exactly as they would have expected, when, suddenly, a clerk jumps up from his chair in the observation pit and runs round the court tweaking the womens breasts: jury, witnesses, observers and press alike. He did this several times during trial. When it was all over, the British civil servants challenged the guide and told him that they were disgusted with what they had seen. But he insisted that it was in order, and identical to the way things were done back in the UK. Rubbish! cried the Brits. At that, the guide produced a cutting, taken from the British press. And there it was in black and white... Whenever the judge made one of his witticisms, a titter ran round the court.