Killing joy

Do you remember when we were kids and we’d spend hours catching snowflakes (not the sissy-kind) on our tongues, surrounding parked cars with white snowmen (not a non-white snowperson in sight), making the playground treacherous with ice-slides, throwing snowballs at our friends and cramming snow down the necks of bullies who were targeting the littl’uns?

Weather forecasting wasn’t as good as it is these days … Correction: weather forecasting was slightly more unreliable back then, and we were frequently caught out by bad weather. But I don’t remember anyone running out of food, even though we didn’t have freezers. We always had loads of non- and slow-perishables in the larder and fridge (our Nana and Grampy didn’t even have a fridge – they stored stuff in the cellar), and everyone could cook from scratch. Even at a young age, my pastry was to die for.

Neither do I remember people running out of medication, probably because we weren’t prescribed as much as we are now. Statins? HRT? Felodipine? Hadn’t heard of ’em. Are we really healthier or happier now because of more meds? Nope.

Our homes were chilly, but we wore woollen layers and enjoyed a body-warming diet – cheap cuts of meat and hot milky puds. We lived in a mining village and knew where to get extra coal, if you know what I mean. The elderly lived with or near family and were also supported by their neighbours. There was no winter fuel allowance for cretinous communists to cancel, but fuel was a lot cheaper (pre Ed Milibrain, ya see) and there were fewer electric appliances to excite the meter. Nana even boiled the kettle and saucepans on the open fire. The Church was still relevant as well; it taught us, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”, and, “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them”, from the King James Authorised Version. There is no other Bible. The main thing the Church preaches now is how to hate ourselves.

So, imagine my language when I read this recently in the Daily Mail (there is no other newspaper) that, “The NHS has issued an urgent warning for people not to venture outside as the UK braces for three days of snowfall and a -10C ice blast this weekend. Medics have warned vulnerable people to avoid going out early or late in the evening, to stock up on food and medications and take sensible precautions.” Three days!

Honestly, if we let the State get away with this sort of micro-managing, before you know it they’ll be arresting us unless we stay at home, turn our backs on our elderly and deprive our kids of a proper education. Oh, wait … The Covid pandemic was indeed full of unwelcome surprises, including draconian loss of freedoms and the intentional crashing of the economy by the Nanny State … during a Tory administration of all things. I’ve always maintained that BoJo bless him lost control of Downing Street during that time, when Hancock showed his true political colours, and Valance and Whitty revelled in their undeserved folk-hero status. History will judge them unkindly.

Back to my youth. Winter over, we were also hardier and less paranoid during the warmer months. We used to love larking around in the sea. I remember in particular St Bees, Silloth, Filey and Weston-super-Mare (we were well travelled). St Bees wasn’t too far from the Sellafield nuclear processing plant, or whatever it was called. During one trip to the beach, the family had been in the sea for a while and I needed the loo. I paddled out of the water, up the beach, into the car park, and availed myself of the council-run facilities. When I returned, everyone was in stitches, because those facilities discharged directly into the sea, within sight of where we were playing (this was pre-privatisation, you understand). And here was me thinking we’d been told not to swallow the water because of the salt. How’d we survive? Perhaps Gloria Gaynor could re-write her anthem for the benefit of today’s snowflake generation.

When not in the sea we’d ride our bikes all over, on main roads as well as country lanes, without helmets, knee pads, lights or puncture kits. Nowadays, cyclists demand their own lanes and pay more for helmets than they do for the actual bikes. Furthermore, there was no such thing as iPhone trackers. We’d go off after breakfast, come back for lunch, go somewhere else then back for tea. One of our favourite haunts was a brook that meandered through farmland on the edge of the village. To get from bank to bank, we waded calf-deep, skipped over steppingstones, or swung on a length of frayed rope. There’s a sewage treatment plant upstream now. There wasn’t then. Know what I mean?

The Nanny State also wants to control what we eat, for health and environment reasons, but the end-result will be poorer health and an even cr*ppier planet. The climate debate has been hijacked by the bean-curd brigade, who are attempting a back-passage manoeuvre to stop animal-farming, because a) cattle fart methane, which is a greenhouse gas, and b) farming is cruel and we should treat animals like family. Obviously, no meat or dairy means no need for livestock, so the bean-curders will either have to cruelly cull cattle, which I hope is not how they treat family, or keep cows as quasi-pets that will continue to emit methane. All those butt-tasting bean burgers for nothing. Another consequence of us suffering a plant-based diet is that humans will fart more greenhouse gases. The Nanny State is really the Ninny State.

Nanny Statists argue that they’re only intervening to protect we the people. The problem is, the more they intervene, the more snowflakes expect them to intervene, and if the Nannies don’t intervene, the snowflakes get angry and indiscriminately pursue their fetishes through the courts. Did somebody say, “Timewasters”? This lack of personal responsibility morphs with their sense of entitlement; snowflakes want what they want when they want it on their own terms, and they don’t care about anyone else’s preferences and opinions, nor the natural laws and limitations of science, economics and common sense.

But the thing that really gets me about the Nanny State is that while stopping us doing what we want to do and coercing us into doing what we don’t want to do, all in the name of keeping us safe and extending our lives, they now want to hasten our deaths by allowing ‘assisted dying’. Let me get this straight: we can’t do what we want when we want to live, but we can when we want to die. Is it any surprise that a clear majority of Starmer-Stalin’s Stasis voted for the assisted dying bill, as did nearly all of the orangey lot, and every one of the Greenies. Lefties truly give a whole new meaning to the term ‘kill joy’.