By Mortimer Ribbons
The fashion experts say we'll all need a shirt-waister and a pair
of wedge heels this season. (Guys, get a girl to wear them for you;
wedgies can be dangerous until you get used to them.) The bad news
is that waistlines will be nipped in. So all those Muffin Tops that
have been allowed to luxuriate over low-cut waistbands are likely
to find themselves back in the gym.
The deer are massing in the park – possibly planning a breakout
– and there's a plague of grey squirrels in the garden. They've
already stolen all the red squirrel jobs, but I still feel Identity
Cards could help to keep them under control. We need to persuade
the foxes that it's safe to go back to the countryside. The trouble
is they like their chickens ready-fried these days. And they've
developed this hoodie attitude; they sneer when you come near them,
and they can hardly be bothered to slink away.
While the radio's droning on about education, a teenage squirrel
is trying to strip the bark off the garden umbrella. (Without a
proper role model how can it know which trees to destroy?) The Minister's
clearly terrified of Middle Class Parents. These people have an
unfair interest in education, and they simply can't be allowed to
start picking and choosing and shouldering the lower classes aside.
What politicians are unwilling to admit is that an interest in education
turns you middle class. It's already happened to the Labour elite:
they don't send their own kids to the local skool, do they?
Every day I pass the pulverised remains of St. Anne's, which covers
a couple of acres on the corner of Manor Rd and Bouverie. I always
wondered why they were knocking down a perfectly good Nun's Home
just to build another one, (and why people were writing ‘Greedy
Nuns’ on the Demo One signs), but I now see that part of the
land has been sold off to finance the new building, and that the
site has been split in two. The active area where the big diggers
roam has two hundred yards of ten-foot fence, painted black and
garnished with razor wire, for developers to hide behind. (I believe
this magazine is running a Reader's Competition to guess how many
luxury residential units can be crammed into the available space.)
Recently, two nuns visited the shop to ask if we had a spare 13
million at all, because the scheme's gone a little bit wrong. We
asked what happened. Did they get diddled by the developers, at
all? They said hush now, don't tell a soul, but Reverend Mother's
made a bollox of the rittymatic. She costed the scheme most carefully
on her good old hundred-bead rosary; but it turns out there may
have been a bead or two missing...
A well-known wheeze in planning circles is to get approval for
one scheme, and then build something else. The Planning Office may
wring its hands but, if the company's gone bankrupt, what can they
do? Years ago there was an attractive urban wasteland of smashed
factories and derelict buildings behind our shop. The Council sent
round a letter saying we don’t want the Gypsies in with their
nasty caravans, do we? (Actually they probably said Travelling Tinkerish
Folk of Mixed Country of Origin, but the meaning was clear enough.)
So a scheme was approved for shops along the front, workshops and
studios down the side, and a few flats at the back. Then, when it
was built, it turned out the first company had gone bankrupt and
the new one had built a housing estate. And it was a Moslem one,
too, so no-one could say anything.
We need more transparency in the planning process. In particular
we need to know who to approach, and how much we have to bung them.
An inside source says Hackney is running out of schoolyards and
corner cupboards to sell to dodgy developers, but anything's worth
a try. 'Forget the Family Silver,' he said, 'we're flogging the
fucking floorboards here. Wanna buy a caff on Broadway Market?’
No snowdrops yet, but a bunch of guys in coats of crocus yellow
are blocking off our street while they plan more speedbumps. It's
a new Twenty's Plenty area, apparently, and a guy with a clipboard
points to a sign with a tortoise on it. I tell him it must be a
bloody fast tortoise. How could anyone hope to achieve 20 miles
an hour on a road like this? And surely extra speed bumps will make
it even slower?
The guy is a little cagey, as people often are when they have to
lie for a living, but he claims that 53% voted for it. Which our
Maths teacher says is an obvious porkie, because you can't get 53%
out of any number under a hundred, and I'm seventy-four per cent
sure that the only people who responded to the questionnaire were
myself and six Council Officials (who were acting under orders.)
SATs are coming up and the homework's getting harder. I'm in competition
with all these really brainy parents who can do percentages in their
sleep and know without being told that 'T' is the term and 'n' is
the position in the series. As if that weren't enough, Granddad's
got his Alzheimers’ Exam. The drugs are expensive, and you
have to convince the Doctor you need them by answering his questions
wrong. I've told him time and again what to say, but he always forgets.
We're considering a private tutor.
Mortimer is CEO of Ribbons and Taylor on Church Street
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