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Tartan’s supposed to be big at the moment, and also leopardskin. So we’re scouring the country for leopard kilts and tartan furs (fake ones, naturally.)
There’s blue-green algae on the reservoir due to global warming. A swan has died and the rest are feeling poorly, so the half-term sailing course has had to be cancelled. We’re trying to get our money back, and we’re also trying the patience of the guy on the phone. He speaks slowly, as if to children:
- Look, I’ve already sent you a letter explaining that refunds have to go through central office. Just fill out the application form, send it off and, within a month or so, we will refund the course fees in full!
- Where’s this application form?
- I just told you, it’s in the letter.
- And when did you send this letter?
- Last week.
- Well, it hasn’t arrived.
- Are you calling me a liar? etc, etc
Why is Health and Safety always used as an excuse to close things down? Oddly enough, there’s a guy in Fresh and Wild dishing out blue-green algae pills. He says these ones come from a completely different reservoir, and are completely safe. So let’s just tell the kids to stop drinking the sailing water and get their algae in pill form instead.
Apparently, we’ve got a CCTV camera for every 14 people now, which is marvellous, of course, but I have to wonder who’s going to find the time to watch them all. I know we’ve filled our local Town Hall with monitor screens and surveillance teams but I think it’s too little, too late. (And I can’t believe I was ever so naïve as to think we should turn the Town Hall into a cinema and social centre.) I did get a glimmer of an idea the other day while vacuuming our teenager at his terminal. Surveys say our teenagers are the worst in Europe – meaning they’re the best at going out drinking, fucking and fighting. So we need to encourage them to stay in more. (And I’m sure we can count on the Council here to never open the Sports Centre or provide any other distractions.) We need to get these youngsters off MSN and back into TV – particularly the more boring reality shows. This way we can develop a new super-breed of couch potatoes with guaranteed jobs for the future monitoring all this extra CCTV. ‘Look Tray, the geezer’s crossin the road’. ‘Yeah… there goes a car an all… any crisps left?’
Naturally we’re outraged that Hackney’s been voted the worst place to live in England, and our natural instinct is to trumpet its many excellent features to all corners of the Kingdom. However, our ‘worst’ label may actually be a blessing in disguise because ‘nice’ areas are apparently in line for a 400 percent rise in their council tax. Which is a huge amount of money, and N16 would score alarmingly highly on the Niceness Index. Although we have a shortage of good schools, so do a lot of richer areas – Chelsea, for instance, solves its education problems by not having any schools at all – and Stoke Newington’s developed a Sixth Form, which is another worrying notch on the Niceometer. Our crime rate’s fine – nowhere higher – and the streets are commendably crappy, but I suspect we’ll run into trouble with our Pepsi rating (Professionals per square inch), and we’re in obvious danger from our numbers of wild vegetarians.
Fortunately, the official response to this civic slur has been limited to putting up banners saying We Love Hackney. What we need now is to feature all the empty shops and make dummy frontages to hide the ‘nice’ ones. Delis and bakeries could be disguised as branches of Iceland, restaurants as Starburgers and Chicken Planets, and the new optician as a pawn shop. (People wearing contact lenses increase the Niceness Quotient.) Anything else can be a Lidl.
The area round the Vortex has been adequately disguised as a bomb site for some time now, and, although the park is hard to hide, the Council has done valuable work turning the Southwest corner into a permanent slum fit only for funfairs. The council tax assessors may not make it past this point because the Water Board has turned the entire area into a traffic jam, and then fucked off – see explanatory DVD ‘Replumbing London.’ (Every track we play in the shop has a horn section now. It’s not a mellow Muscle Shoals sound either; it’s the pissed-off pooping of homicidal drivers stalled forever by the temporary lights.)
If too many people switch power suppliers it makes an area ‘nicer’, and consideration is given to holiday destinations. So we’d better all go to Torremolinos next year, and cancel that new windmill on the roof. The final nice factor is the numbers of people who are going to get a new sofa. (Hopefully they won’t count all the old ones on the pavement or we’re really screwed.) So, have a word with the people next door and persuade them that, if they really must get that leather corner unit from DFS, then at least have it delivered to the wrong address – in N15 or somewhere.
A shock report on the radio says that herbivores are emitting methane at either end, and it’s six times worse than CO2. I always thought global warming was caused by Ryanair and Jeremy Clarkson, but apparently it’s been the grass eaters all along. This is the real reason why they’ve removed Daniel Defoe’s gravestone from the Library. The sign says the ‘atmosphere is unsuitable’ here and, although Mare St may seem much worse, it’s further from the deer in the park chewing away to change the climate under our very noses and emitting stone-eroding gases from either end.
Mortimer Ribbons thinks he runs Ribbons & Taylor on Church St
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