At the End of the Day.

Dark thoughts from abroad

‘Mum bit off lover’s testicles’ announced a piece in The Sun today. I’ve often noticed in the past that tabloid subs think being a parent adds human interest to these bizarre headlines, but I’m always baffled by it. There is a clue in here as to how Newscorp thinks, viz – if you don’t have kids, you must be boring, or possible selfish. But if you bite your bloke’s nuts off, you’re a bit of a hero. As opposed to mad.

The same rule was applied to a woman in the Mail yesterday, whose agony story was headed ‘My 25-year battle with grey hair’. The Mail, as you will have noticed over the years, thinks everyone who has children out of wedlock should be neutered, but I didn’t realise until now that the paper saw fending off grey hair as successful persistence worthy of a Victoria Cross.

I can believe that the Mail would see a woman who bit off the goolies of a yob as somebody destined for a doffing at the Palace, but the grey hair thing was an oddity, even for Paul Dacre. I could be in there tomorrow on this basis: ‘My 25-year battle with brewery belly’, or ‘My 63-year battle with dickheads’. We expect something more than this under the heading ‘revelations’, don’t we? ‘My wicked, bestial sex obsession with cuddly toys’ or something similar. ‘My saucy life’ by Liam Perrins. Bah-boom.

Perhaps this means that most people are so potty now, the Mail is aiming for the exception rather than the rule. My experiences over the last few days would indeed confirm that the wombats are in the majuority; when it comes to the unsocialised British, over 90% are at best unskilled and at worst unmentionable.

Last night we dined in a restaurant where a large table had been taken up by the fecund Underclass tendency. Three blokes and their partners took up half the table; the rest contained their progeny. Two of the three women were pregnant. The adults were all so tattooed, at first I thought they might be Maoris. I’ve always quite liked Maoris who, if nothing else, are often very good at Rugby, and living on next to nothing. Not so this lot: their special talent was obviously impregnation followed by successful delivery.

Of the six children, four were boys below the age of seven. One was busy hacking at the table leg with his ‘toy’ weapon. The youngest (about two, I’d have said) was pushing and pulling violently at a high chair. I took this to mean he was in training for the jailbreaks that would inevitably be required as he became older. Of the two girls, one – aged about eleven – looked as if she was single-handedly out to prove that paedophiles are right to think pre-pubescent kids are actually incurable ravers. Joking apart, the level of sexualisation made me shudder.

So anyway, I found myself staring at the tableau before me, and thinking, ‘What are we going to do with all these wild things in twenty years time?’ Then I found myself thinking much darker thoughts to do with biting balls off. Finally, the thoughts became more selfish: ‘I won’t be around to deal with it, so to hell with it’.

I never thought I’d find the certainty of death reassuring, but when faced with the equal certainty of explosive moron reproduction, I do see it as a way out of worrying about it. This won’t do: after a certain age, if you’re fortunate enough to get by without needing a real job, life should be largely about putting stuff back in that will help society at large….and of course, those grandchildren we say we don’t want, but can’t wait to have.

The trouble is that, as the years pass, the sort of input in my head increasingly involves wishing there were more of us who’re bright, less of us who are dim, and none of us in that state of consciousness I can only describe as total intellectual darkness.

This isn’t entirely to do with the lower classes. The Prime Minister, for example, said earlier this evening (as he turned up for another go on the euroundabout) “What we need here is the broadest possible level of agreement on the best possible solution, and that’s what we’re going to be working on”.

For those who had assumed Dave’s objective was a game or two of backgammon followed by the pandemonium of anarchic disagreement, the PM’s statement must have come as a traumatic shock. Speaking for myself, however, it evoked a tired sigh. Far better to have said nothing. Just like PMs used to do in the old days. Better still would it have been, had somebody used a contraceptive four decades ago. Similar black musings apply in the case of Blair, Mandelson, Mensch, Balls, Osborne, Murdoch, van Rompuy, Barroso, Sarkozy….the list goes on and on.

Global overpopulation remains another can kicked way down the road. But for me, it’s more of a qualitative problem. A famous comic of the 1940s used to open every turn with, “The day war broke out, my wife said to me ‘What good are you?'” I increasingly feel that this question should be addressed to every Western kid at the age of, say, eleven. It should be every child’s obligatory Human Right to be asked to justify their existence. If nothing else, it would disabuse them of the notion that they are entitled to anything.