I have seen the future, and it does not work

It does not seem to be the start of April, so I guess Amazon must be serious when they claim to be exploring the possibility of having their products delivered by unmanned drones.

This creates the attractive possibility of having the latest best-seller precision-dropped through the panes of your cold frame, or your beloved dog cut to shreds by an Octocopter as it descends onto your lawn. 

But it’s progress, isn’t it? And surely exactly what the City’s teenage scribblers had in mind when they trashed Greggs’ share price during the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, on the grounds that the whole idea of a “shop” was dead.

They will surely have the last laugh as miniature helicopters fly through our office windows bearing sausage rolls and cups of coffee.

Even if the Air Traffic Control implications seem more than a little disturbing.

This was the future as predicted in the pages of my favourite childhood comic, in which a lucky boy called General Jumbo had a vast miniature air force, army and navy at his command.

I always related to him, not so much because I had a particular interest in model armed forces, but because I shared his tendency to stoutness.

Who would have expected The Beano to turn out to be a more reliable predictor of the future than Tomorrow’s World?

If the futurologists of the 1970s were to be believed, by now we would be working no more than 20 hours a week, retiring at 50, enjoying limitless free nuclear power and subsisting on vitamin pills.

None of which seems likely to come to pass apart from not working very long, as pretty much every job in the country is outsourced to India.

Still, not to worry. “Dave” Cameron and an assortment of his family and friends are out in China as I type, opening up a new golden age of export-led growth. Though his decision to put Jaguar Land Rover at the forefront of promoting UK plc does make me wonder whether he is not secretly in league with the Dalai Lama to bring the Chinese weeping to their knees, if personal experience of my hugely expensive and totally unreliable Land Rover Discovery is anything to go by.

Sorry. I should have put a warning at the top of this column for my new Wednesday audience. (Which, research tells me, is larger, richer and more business-orientated than the bunch of dullards who pick up the paper on Tuesdays.) This is the weekly update from the bloke who hates “progress” in all its manifestations, from Ed Miliband to trendy church services by way of wind farms.

A fine example occurred last week when I received a letter from my four-year-old son Charlie’s school informing me that he would no longer be required to wear a shirt and tie. Even though the pleasingly reactionary dress code had been pretty decisive in my choice of school in the first place.

Even worse was the reason for the change. The pupils had requested it at the “school council”. The oldest of them is 11, for heaven’s sake. If you consult them you will end up with whole classes in Spiderman costumes and school lunches supplied entirely by Cadbury’s.

It’s the daftest thing I have heard since Alex Salmond extended the vote to 16-year-olds as part of his attempts to rig the Scottish independence referendum, with the hugely pleasing outcome that their teenage contrarian instincts apparently make them one of the groups likeliest to vote “No”.

Where will it all end? In five years’ time I expect that Charlie (aged nine) will be voting in a referendum on Northumbrian independence, all our high streets will be boarded-up and filled with tumbleweed, and the news websites will be dominated by heartbreaking stories of all the Christmas presents destroyed as “Cyber Monday” segued seamlessly into “Drone Crash Tuesday”.

Of course it’s never going to happen. At least not until they have perfected an Octocopter guaranteed to flutter down in the five minutes you have chosen to nip to the loo. And trained it to write a “Sorry You Were Out” card and leave it wherever you are least likely to find it.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A fascist takes charge of Sunderland? Yes, it's April Fools' Day

I have always loathed April Fool jokes, but even I managed a smile at the obviously spoof story that Sunderland AFC had recruited a self-proclaimed fascist as their manager.

Luckily one from the right (or should that be far right?) side of the north-south European divide that ensures Hitler a permanent place in our collective memory as the supreme example of total evil; yet permits a rather more indulgent view of his Italian counterpart Mussolini as a vaguely comic incompetent, except in the matter of making the trains run on time.

Perhaps, if Signor Di Canio fails to save his new club from relegation, fans might refrain from hanging him upside down from a lamppost and allow him to apply his skills to running East Coast Trains instead?

But the Sunderland appointment, and resulting shock departure of David Miliband (whose resignations apparently come, like buses, in appropriately banana-like bunches after a long and tedious wait) was by no means the only hilarious moment of the last week.

There was the original Miliband departure for an organisation called International Rescue (stop now, my sides are aching), which can presumably only be capped next April by his brother going off to fly Fireball XL5.

Spot the difference: Miliband (D) and Brains from the real International Rescue

Then there was that obviously comical loon in North Korea declaring war on his neighbours and threatening the United States with nuclear annihilation, in the manner of a small boy with a pea-shooter squaring up to a Challenger tank.

My, how we shall chuckle about that in a few weeks as we crouch in the cupboard under the stairs with a meagre supply of tinned food, waiting for the fall-out “all clear” from sirens that were scrapped as part of the Government’s civil defence cuts of 1991.

It set me thinking of other great April Fool spoofs of the past, from Richard Dimbleby’s spaghetti trees on Panorama to the classic BSE scare – as a result of which, you may recall, we are currently supposed to be dying by the million from an incurable brain disease called new variant CJD.

Except that, in reality, the highest death toll exacted by BSE seems to have occurred in the 1990s, among beef farmers driven to suicide by stress.

Then we were all going to die of salmonella in killer eggs, listeria in killer cheese, the total collapse of civilisation as a result of the Millennium computer bug, dioxins, asbestos, lead in petrol and the deadly HN51 bird flu pandemic, in the unlikely event that we survived childhoods blighted by ritual Satanic abuse.

Luckily all these grave threats were somehow averted, after the expenditure of many billions of pounds on tighter regulations and improved procedures. Supervised by armies of civil servants and consultants, who have all done a fantastic job of keeping straight faces and never letting on that it was all a huge joke at our expense.

Similarly, I marvel at the way applicants for wind turbines manage to stop themselves giggling as they spout their regulation guff about how they are doing society a favour and helping to save the planet by wrecking our glorious unspoilt landscapes in pursuit of a quick profit for themselves.

Sadly not a spoof

But sadly we cannot dismiss global warming as yet another April Fool joke, despite the evidence of the remaining snow outside my window as I write this, because the beauty of this particular mega-scare is that we will all be dead before anyone can pronounce authoritatively on whether it had any basis in reality.

This is the true genius of the climate change scaremongers, and one that should be taken on board by all would-be April Fool jokesmiths of the future.

There is no point coming with a threat that we can see through by 12 noon on April 1, or even a year or a decade later. Make it one that threatens to wipe out humanity in a century or more, so that the gullible can fret about their grandchildren and insist that we all turn our lives upside down trying to protect the interests of the unborn.

Surely this has to be a far better jape than pretending to organise a fascist rally at the Stadium of Light (or should that now be Night)?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.