Where's my marmot?

Sorry I have not been showering you with highly amusing updates to disrupt your working day, but I have a visitor. It is a real person and everything and not one of the cockroaches that sometimes creep under the front door during the night. Or a wasp. I had one of those once too. Not only would it be rude to come home from work drunk and then ignore her (after a sound beating) in order to sit down and write bollocks for you, but I also have to spend a fair bit of time pulling her hair out of the sink.

In addition to these pastimes, I am troubled because the three marmots that live outside my apartment have disappeared. I suspect that the arrival of the revolutionary gardeners a few days ago has something to do with it. I mentioned it to Princess Obama when he wasn't fighting insects and he issued a statement to me that he was "deeply concerned about the disappeared marmots" and that "the world was watching". Perhaps it was "gravely concerned".

Living in a land where the most important democratic questions remaining are over gay guns and concealed marriages (and before that in a place where the foremost issues were cctv cameras, banana straightness and whether an old lady in a metal hat should get to say 'hello' to the government at the end of each summer) it has been most interesting recently to follow the imaginative interpretation of democracy advocated by our friends with beards. In a recent televised popularity contest that doesn't feature Susan Boyle, or in fact singing at all, there have been allegations of vote rigging. Thankfully the country in question has a head-honcho to sort out problems like this, and he has stated that there is no problem whatsoever, because he says so, now sit down and shut up. I recognise this remarkably powerful argument from my time spent attending day prison, or 'school' as it is sometimes called, and because it is used by parents. Everyone in their right mind agrees that schools and parents are a good thing, so the problem (which doesn't exist anyway) appears to be sorted. All done bar the street protests, rioting and live ammunition. If one one good thing has come out of this it's recognition that the BBC and its nefarious backers, those skillful masters of strategy and deceit known as the British government are 'evil'. I can only imagine that this is because the BBC is carrying out the same agenda of deranged spelling and grammatical laxness with its Farsi website as it does in English. And it goes without saying (which strangely is a phrase that only ever goes with saying) that sending John Simpson to a country is never diplomatically polite.

Notwithstanding the above, religious republics and even hard line regimes like school or family admit certain rights. For example at school you have the right to be treated as a homogeneous group because of your age. You also have the right to be guilty until proven guilty, the right to eat your lunch outside in the rain while the teachers smoke in the staff room and the right to lug a metric tonne of books around with you. The right to run around in subzero temperatures wearing just shorts and a flimsy shirt, until all your appendages turn blue and drop off, while supervised by a games teacher in a parkha, was a personal favourite. All of these rights are afforded to you because age is a superbly accurate proxy for intelligence: when you are young you "still have a lot to learn" and hence shouldn't be allowed to learn about sex or violence (in films and videogames, it's fine to learn about it at the end of a larger kid's fist) or drugs. Confused? I was. Magically, on your sixteenth birthday you gain all this wisdom and common sense at once, and are welcome to run around having babies with fifteen different partners, while after eighteen getting hooked on (a select group of traditionally approved) drugs is de rigueur.
People have pathetically short memory spans, and I think if more parents could remember clearly what their time at school was like they'd never be so stupid as to leave their kids alone there armed only with some blunt pencils, tedious literature and a cheese sandwich.

Really though, benign dictatorships would be a jolly good thing in terms of efficiency, if it was possible to find a dictator who wasn't malignant and more to the point happened to agree with your own views on everything.

I went to a birthday party for toddlers last weekend. Don't worry, it was by invitation and I didn't take a camera. Or a cage. Overall, there was less screaming than I expected and very smooth transitions from paddling pool to sandpit to candle extinguishing. Parents then formed their offspring up into orderly groups to collect party bags and go home for baths and bed. So maybe the benign dictatorship model works, until the subjects learn to form views and talk back.