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128 pages

English

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Life is full of trivia. More and more, it seems, every waking minute of our lives is spoken for, by the inconsequential, the irrelevant, the incidental, the positively wasteful, and by a whole host of other stuff that serves no purpose whatsoever other than to distract us from what is really important. It's time for a remedy. It's time to counter the avalanche of useless stuff with something really essential. And here it is: everything one could ever need to know in order to retain a hold on what life is really all about - in one easy-to-use compendium of wisdom:The A-Z of Stuff. This work has been painstakingly compiled - with no reference to sensitivities, accuracy or fairness - to provide its readers with all the indispensable stuff they will ever need. So, whether it is an explanation of the flaws of democracy, a demolition of the principle of 'human rights', a treatise on the scourge of testosterone or a review of the unavoidable hilarity of sex, it can all be found within the pages ofThe A-Z.Presented in an easy-to-read, concise format, TheA-Zeducates and entertains at the same time. With a large helping of humour and some snappy doggerel, it is an invaluable mine of information, but one that doesn't take itself entirely seriously - or at all!TheA-Z of Stuffwill win over all those who are almost continuously distracted by the unimportant stuff, and equip them instead with all that is really important - and, no doubt, with some nourishing food for thought

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	08 novembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781785897085
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The A-Z of Stuff

David Fletcher
Copyright © 2016 David Fletcher

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
In memory of sanity
Contents
Introduction
Anarchic ideas
BBC
Cultures
Democracy
European Union
Financial Services
Government
Human Rights
Islam
Jury System
Kids
London
Men
NHS
Officialdom
Population
Quaggas
Religion
Sex
Taxation
United Kingdom
Vatican
Women
X-rated
Young people
Zealots
By the same author:
Introduction
Life is tough, not least because one has to digest just so much ‘stuff’. In fact, there is such a colossal amount of stuff that much of the really important stuff can get neglected while we were all so busy dealing with some of the basic stuff like reading and maths (and then some of the less basic stuff like coping with acne and writing some half-credible CVs).
So here it is: a brief compendium of all the important stuff that may have been neglected along the way, designed to equip all those who read it with virtually everything they need to know about the world around us. It has been compiled without any interference from the political correctness brigade and, of course, without any scrutiny of its accuracy or its merit. This, in itself, is another thing one must learn about the world: that it doesn’t come in a precise, calibrated form and that it is far from being full of the worthy and the good.
Oh, another thing. To render this useful tome suitably attractive to the widest audience possible it has been thought necessary to dispense with a more sensible ordering of its component topics in favour of an ‘A-Z’ theme. This apparently is what ‘the market’ now requires, presumably because the market is so full of numbnuts who simply can’t deal with other than the most infantile approach to any topic you care to mention. In fact, I really do wonder whether this work has any real chance at all and it might have been better to pen another work entitled The A-Z of Pointless Selfies. All I would need to have done then is write some stupid captions…
Anyway, I seem to have got off the point. And the point, I emphasise, is to use this book to equip oneself with all the essential important stuff one will ever need, and so make one’s life just a little less tough.

Bon voyage.
David Fletcher
Spring 2016
Anarchic ideas
Right. Well, let’s start with an admission, and it’s that this first dose of stuff would be better titled ‘Heretical ideas’. Because, you see, it’s all about the need to challenge orthodoxy in all its manifestations, and that this challenge is best conducted by formulating heretical – or rebellious or unconventional or simply unorthodox – ideas, ideas that might just upset the established position on any number of issues. However, due to the constraints imposed by that idiotic alphabet format referred to in the introduction, I’ve had to go with ‘Anarchic ideas’. And I will have to ask you to accept this on the basis that anarchy can be taken to mean ‘a lack of obedience to an authority’ and therefore ‘anarchic ideas’ could just about be interpreted as ‘insubordinate thinking’ – which is exactly what I intend to discuss. So, with all that bloomin’ nonsense sorted out, it’s time to get on, and to kick off with, ‘What’s wrong with orthodoxies?’
The short answer: virtually everything. The longer answer: they cause beliefs and concepts to ossify, they stifle original thinking and development and they are often hijacked by religious, political and scientific establishments for their own benefit and to the detriment of us all. And, if that’s not bad enough, they’re just not the sort of thing to get the blood coursing through one’s veins… whereas a bit of anarchic thinking can turn one’s cheeks positively scarlet and may even bring on palpitations.
That’s not to say that Galileo Galilei turned puce when he suggested that the Earth revolved around the sun – in the face of the Christian orthodoxy of the time – or that Charles Darwin had to lie down for a minute when, by proposing that species evolved gradually, he was implying that the Earth had not been created perfectly (as was still the orthodoxy of the day). But it is to say that one could well understand it if their bodies did experience a physical reaction to their mental achievements, because their achievements were remarkable both in an intellectual sense and in a sodding great impact sense. I mean, it may not have happened immediately, but their ‘anarchic ideas’ did end up sweeping away some pretty entrenched orthodoxies – and then dumping them in a dustbin. And thank God they did. Otherwise the Dark Ages would still be alive and well and I’d be writing this piece with a goose quill – or, indeed, I wouldn’t be writing it at all.
Yes, three cheers for all the world’s heretics, and three cheers for the fact that they’re not all historical figures. So we had people like Oscar Wilde, Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lennon stirring up things quite recently, and we’ve still got people like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking and Kenny Orkenninot doing it now. (And if you haven’t heard, Kenny Orkenninot is the guy who recently demolished that ridiculous L’Oréal Paris orthodoxy with his radical idea, now proven beyond doubt, that not all women are actually worth it after all…)
Anyway, we owe a debt of gratitude to these chaps, not least because in confronting old, entrenched ideas they faced harsh criticism, ridicule – or even a rather unenviable situation on a pile of wood with a stake up its middle. And whilst the incineration threat is now a little less, ‘original thinkers’ still face all sorts of problems, and maybe ridicule more than anything else, a fact I will now demonstrate by setting out three heretical (or anarchic) thoughts of my very own, starting with the proposition that education in Britain was possibly or even probably better in the 1960s than it is now.

1. Yes, I think there is a strong case to be made for regarding the British educational system in the 1960s as superior to that of the present day. And I think the evidence for this is largely empirical and can be found in a simple comparison of the outcomes of the two very different systems. So, in my opinion, in the 1960s it was not unusual to find school-leavers who could write legibly, who knew where to shove their apostrophes, who could calculate the change required in a shop purchase in their heads and who, when talking to adults, could put a whole sentence together without the use of a single grunt. They would probably be relatively courteous as well and not find too much trouble in grasping the concept of good timekeeping at work – or, indeed, the concept of work itself. Fast-forward fifty years, and it is now not unusual to find school-leavers – some of them emerging from universities – whose mastery of texting has both slaughtered their skills with a pen and obliterated any relationships they might have been developing with pronouns, inverted commas, capital letters and structured, well-thought-out, comprehensible prose. As for their innate numeracy… well, it doesn’t seem innate any more. And as for their ‘work skills’… well, not all of them appear to realise that being paid requires something in return, and that this something should preferably start at the agreed time. Furthermore, quite a few of them find it difficult to understand that one’s relations with one’s work colleagues might not necessarily be enhanced by one’s trolling these work colleagues. In short, no matter how much education is being force-fed to pupils (yes, pupils, not students), and in whatever way it is being force-fed, the results are not what they used to be. Which does make one wonder why.
Well, let’s just remind ourselves of what used to go on. How, in those cold, gloomy classrooms of the sixties, class sizes were often over thirty, there were no classroom assistants but just a single class teacher, and he or she would require his or her charges to sit upright at a desk, facing a well-used blackboard at the front of the room. Discipline was somewhere between strict and totally uncompromising, with that rare beast, the disruptive child, dealt with by a rap over the knuckles or a ruler on the palm of the hand – while the overwhelming majority of non-disruptive children got on with their times tables or practised their writing and how to write. Or maybe they were acquiring another fact about British history that would eventually add to their sense of identity and their pride in their country.
Sounds really grim, doesn’t it? But there was worse to come. Many would now have to cope with a social mobility that had been thrust upon them as a direct result of an antiquated grammar school system, one that was based on an individual’s academic ability and not on