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GROUSE shooters look forward to the “Glorious Twelfth”– the day in October when their season opens.
Perhaps the child-loving people of Plymouth will come to refer to the Wednesday just past as the “Glorious Twenty-eighth”.
This was the day they learned from The Herald that the makers of the teen-scaring device, the Mosquito, have now produced a half-price version cheap enough to go on the wall of every house.
Just think: teenagers won’t be able to lounge around in shopping malls or school halls. They’ll flee from street and avenue, pursued by a high-pitched whine that only they can hear.
There will be peace and quiet from Ernesettle to the Erme.
But wait! What will all this cost? Even at around £250 each, this will add up to a tidy sum.
SO HERE is my Modest Proposal for preventing the children of Plymouth being a burden to their parents or city, and for making them beneficial to the community (with apologies to the 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift).
Whoever can find a fair, cheap and easy method of turning these children into sound, useful members of society would deserve to have his statue set up in the park.
Here’s the idea, as first proposed by Mr Swift 280 years ago as a solution to the Irish potato famine.
Eat them.
They may look a little unsavoury, but so does a turnip fresh out of the ground. A vigorous scrub in warm water, into which a teaspoon of bleach has been poured, will soon make them quite harmless to human health.
Some of these young people are pleasantly plump and would not need to be fattened up at all.
As for recipes, I would recommend a nice Rogan Josh to disguise the pungent odour (Lynx deodorant, we think).
For those (like the kindly gentleman who punched a young trick-or-treater in the face last autumn) who want extra vengeance, serve them up with lots of peas, which all kids hate.
Not only will this solution eventually empty the streets of the little blighters, it will also be a recession-proof alternative to shopping at Tesco.
Top cop Jim Webster passed through The Herald office as I wrote this, and threatened to feel my collar. The Mosquito, he says, is a bit like handcuffs: solves the immediate problem, but you really want a better long-term solution.
Jim is working with kids and helping them to find creative outlets for their energy.
I, on the other hand, reckon they’ll be delicious served up with a generous helping of tolerance.
SURELY cock-fights are illegal in this country? When Ted Fry and Tudor Evans met in the Frobisher committee room at the Council House this week, you wouldn’t have thought so.
I’ll swear I saw money change hands under the table councillors gleefully sat back to watch the Tory deputy leader and Labour group leader trading verbal blows.
THE Council is advertising a £33,000-a-year job for a “deprivation of liberty lead officer”.
Was this, I wondered, Plymouth’s man in Guantanamo Bay?
Not so, said a fragrant (definitely not Lynx) council spokeswoman. She explained that it was a title forced on them by the Department of Health, under the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards and Mental Capacity Act 2005.
She also told me what the job entailed. Three times. Erm.
I COULD have sworn I heard muffled grunts coming from a cupboard in the office of Barry Keel, the council chief executive, yesterday. Keel apparently briefed Labour group leader Tudor Evans the evening before on the council’s top-secret budget (see Page 1).
Since Evans didn’t get on the phone to the media, he was either sworn to secrecy… or else lying trussed and bound in that cupboard, with a sock stuffed in his mouth.