Saturday column – May 18

With the agreement of CLOT, I now bring you some samples, starting with the chapter called The Golden Age.

"In the days of Henry VIII there was contentment in the land as the populace enjoyed sustainable living. For food, the peasants kept livestock and grew crops, and what they had was always just enough – or less.

"Living in close-knit, self-sustaining communities, there was no need to travel, but for those who wished to venture and explore, judicious use of climate-friendly wind power, or rowing if necessary, could take these adventurers thousands of miles, although those caught on a lee shore were at risk of being dashed to pieces on the rocks.

"But those who died in those days of drowning, starvation, or disease, could reflect that they left the planet more or less as they found it."

We now move forward a chapter or two to that titled The Diabolical Darby Dynasty (thanks to enlightenment from the ideas of revisionist historian Clive Booth).

"In the early 18th century one of the world's evil exploitative masterminds, Abraham Darby I, the first of a notorious dynasty, abandoned the use of sustainable biofuels and moved to the use of deadly, polluting, dirty, coal, and so began a shameful era now known as the Industrial Revolting Evolution.

"It was to claim millions of lives and destroy the Earth. Today thousands make a pilgrimage every year to a monument of folly and shame, the Iron Bridge, which has been symbolically painted red, to reflect the blood of the victims.

"An entire museum has been created in the Ironbridge Gorge in memory of those who died."

Fast forward to the 1980s, and the chapter called The Blessed Margaret.

"Along came a heroine who has gone down in history as The Blessed Margaret, a humble grocer's daughter who became a spear carrier for forward thinking on environmental matters.

"Working in filthy, hard, and dangerous jobs were thousands of exploited members of the downtrodden proletariat called 'miners.'

"In those ignorant days The Blessed Margaret showed them the light by offering them a chance to escape their lives of Earth-destroying toil and acid rain creation and take up other forms of employment in, for instance, the agrarian industry.

"They rose up in anger, brainwashed as they were by the reactionary demagogues of the Scargill-McGahey axis.

"Undeterred, kindly Margaret found them a new path, and closed all those outdated 'pits.' In time the 'miners' realised the error of their ways. However, there were some hardliners who refused to renounce and repent, and they are currently being re-educated at Wormwood Scrubs.

"Here they are held with industrial and business leaders of the 1970s and 1980s for historical offences against the environment and for climate change denial, thanks to the emergence of a new branch of jurisprudence known as climinology."

My last chapter encompasses some current events.

"In 2019 climate change martyrs stopped traffic in London, saving thousands of lives by reducing pollution.

"Saint Greta spoke to the people. The people listened. The politicians listened. For Greta was wise beyond her years and spake the truth. Also, it seemed there might be a few votes in it.

"By chance, an opportunity came along for polluted, industrialised, energy-wasting Britain.

"It was a phenomenon known as Brexit. This, people were promised, would ground all flights and yield the total destruction of the nation's industrial base, including the closure of all car plants.

"It seemed too good to be true. Excited by the vision, people voted for it.

"The moment was captured in a celebrated painting, called Greta Gives The Word, showing MPs at her feet like disciples, looking up at her admiringly.

"The painting was given pride of place in Westminster Hall, although it has now been removed after it was discovered that some of those MPs took regular foreign holidays and others were plotting to cover vast swathes of virgin, rural, oxygen-producing green land with hundreds of thousands of new houses.

"And so it was that Britain led the way in saving the world.

"And the rest of the world felt really bad that they had not joined in."

..........

I like to think that madcap comic Freddie Starr would have enjoyed the BBC's cautious coverage of his death.

For some time the Beeb said that he had been reported dead, but it had not been able to verify it.

My guess is that it feared that as soon as it reported the unpredictable Freddie to be dead, he would pop up out of some giant cake munching a hamster and saying "fooled you!"

It brought to mind that scene in the classic I Claudius in which a sombre Caligula (played by John Hurt) announces to the crowd that Emperor Tiberius is dead. At this point an agitated Tiberius appears behind him on the platform, denying he is dead, and struggling violently with Roman soldiers, who eventually manage to bundle him out of sight.

A few minutes later, after doing some checking, Caligula is able to announce to the crowd: "Tiberius is indeed dead."

.....

You can rely on the Sun to come up with an entertaining headline, but for straightforward simplicity I particularly liked one in this week which read "Vikings Accused of Sexism."

Past gems have included the occasion when the Formula One car of Pedro Diniz exploded in flames during a race. The Sun's headline was "Diniz In The Oven."

Spreading the net wider, there have been various classics, including of course "Shell Found On Beach" and "Lesotho Women Make Excellent Carpets."

Then there was the one which I had heard about, but wondered whether it was legend until I found it myself while flicking through some old papers. It was the headline for a gardening feature, reading "Now Is The Time To Get Dug In."

It appeared on the obituary page.

........

The UK's Eurovision hopes rest this year on Michael Rice, a 21-year-old singer who appeared on X Factor and won the entertainment show All Together Now.

Last year the UK's entry was SuRie, a singer-songwriter. She came 24th. In 2017 it was a Welsh singer Lucie Jones, who had sung in the West End, who did really well, relatively speaking, coming in at 15th.

In 2016 it was Joe and Jake who had taken part in The Voice UK. They came 24th at Eurovision. The year earlier vocal duo Electro Velvet, including a singer who had performed to royalty, managed five points and were another 24th.

What is obvious from all the above is that the UK is never going to win Eurovision unless we start to take it seriously.

Is there no singer in the entire country capable of making chicken noises?