School holiday heaven

I love the school holidays. I'm not at school nor do I have children, but I love the fact my drive to work is quick, easy and uncluttered by yummy mummies (and daddies) taking their little darlings to school. Heaven forbid that they should have to catch the bus or even use their legs.

But hang on a moment, that's what I used to do. When I went to school in the village, I walked. When I progressed to high school in the town 12 miles away, I caught the bus with everyone else. People who lived in the town walked to school or caught the town service bus. I remember being shocked when I found out that people caught a bus to different parts of town, rather than walking.

Perhaps if children walked now, there wouldn't be the growing obesity problem among our young people that the the do-goers are forever bleating on about. Perhaps if they walked, I would zip through the outskirts of the city in the four minutes it took me today, rather than the 15-20 it can take on a normal day. Perhaps, if they walked, all those yummy mummies' BMWs and 4x4s would stop contributing to climate change. Has anyone else noticed how cold it's been this week when the kids are off school?

Woolly hoodies

The lambs have started to gather in great big gangs. They look like children plotting mischief in a break-time playground. I wonder if they have best friends, stories and secrets too?

It can’t be much fun being a lamb, especially if you have the bad luck to be born with balls. A brief idyll, surrounded by sunshine, daisies and mates: then, for the lucky ones, a lifetime of sex, but slaughter for the less fortunate. The more I think about it, the more correlations I can see between lambs and lads. A generation of young male sheep end up at the abattoir every year; in 'less enlightened' times, generations of young men were wiped out on the battlefield, too.

Each time I see a young lamb, I think: “I can’t possibly eat that.” But I still do. I’m not really a very good carnivore because I have contradictory ethics. I had a brief flirtation with vegetarianism as a teenager: I did it for Morrissey but I rapidly relapsed into the ways of the bacon butty. I don’t think he would’ve approved of my foxhunting anyway.

I just don’t like the thought of eating animals when they're still children. Rather than kids in the yard, I’ll try to view them as hoodies gathering at a shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon. If I can persuade myself that they’re actually dull-eyed, attitude-and-acne-ridden thugs, I’ll have less of a problem with it.

Town and country

I am nowhere near the first and no doubt I won’t be the last to remark on the lack of understanding frequently exhibited betwixt town and country. Unlike some, I have never considered the country to be inhabited by barely literate, fundamentalist Christians (the North) or peasants doused in a touch of Archer-esque charm (the South). Nor, curiously, do I believe that Britain’s towns and cities are solely peopled by modern-day Fagins and gun-toting or knife-wielding yobs. Having spent almost a decade and a half living and working in cities before escaping back to this glorious realm, I think I am qualified to make a judgment.

It’s a shame the people that govern us don’t appear to have had adequate experience of the countryside, though. A town Government, voted into power largely by town people, will understandably play to its audience. That’s probably why Gordon Brown is reportedly planning to punish everyone who drives a 4x4 in tomorrow’s Budget. Heaven forbid that he could make them economically less viable for those who don’t actually need them, but curiously, seem best able to afford them.

I have long considered 4x4s to be wasted if they don’t have a tow bar, don’t belong to farmers or to those who live in remote places accessed by single-track roads. But why should those who do live in the wilds or who actually need a powerful tow-vehicle be chastised because of those who run them as ‘gas-guzzling’ status symbols? I am not a city-based ‘yummy mummy’, so perhaps I misunderstand the subtle nuances of needing a 4x4 for the school run. Personally, I can’t see what is wrong with an ordinary car, or even the school bus.

Mr Brown would have us believe that he’s acting against 4x4s as part of the Government’s current obsession with green measures to combat global warming. I wonder if the equivalent of 4x4 drivers were blamed for making it warm enough to grow grapes in Roman Britain...

The Chancellor has been dubbed ‘Stalinist’ in reports today. I wonder if he prefers that to being considered a pursed-lipped puritanical killjoy?