Sighhhhh

Well that is over again for another year. Somehow it seems like a fence that must be crossed in order to progress to the next and final straight of the year. Today the shops will be open again and there will be queues of people hoping to get something for nothing in the post lunacy sales.

It used to be said that farmers could be held accountable for all of the ills of this world. Until there were farmers, the population of planet Earth was nomadic and life was truly nasty brutish and short. If you couldn't keep up with the rest of the family, you were left behind and soon became a vital part of the food chain. Then one day, some guys (probably) decided that as they were getting a little long in the tooth, it might be wise to settle down and start growing stuff and maybe, instead of following the herds of four legged food, they would fence them in and hence, have all that they could eat. just outside the confines of their mud huts. Of course it would be a while before health and safety, vet's bills and the subsidies offered by the EEC, but nevertheless, from there onwards they had it made. From such beginnings, began trade, money, enhanced communications, politics and the rest. People had time to sit around and make mischief for the first time in human history. People got older and it mattered not if you could no longer run behind the horse. You could sit in a corner and someone might just throw you a bone now and then.

Of course it now became possible to find time to invent really useful stuff, and to create works of art. Writing followed and before you know it we had the internet and online banking. The population soared and farmers prospered as they always have done. Their vehicles grew in size and number and the roads filled up and so on and so on. Diseases spread easily with growing numbers of people, war became trendy and with that came the need to produce new and more interesting ways of killing people. Farmers demanded ways of killing nature too. Insecticides, fungicides, mulluscicides, nematocides, arachnicides and all sorts of other nasties came from the demands of farmers. I could go on for hours but I won't.

Now of course the damage is largely complete and the farmer has had his day. The hour of the shopkeeper is upon us and we are experiencing a mass delusion that forces us into the acquisition of rubbish.

The shopkeepers are an alien species that work in cahoots with the fashion designers. They invaded Earth several decades ago and through a complex and subtle brainwashing procedure, have convinced the more malleable humans that they MUST have, whatever the shopkeepers wish to sell. They found that is was possible to palm off, oddly shaped bits of coloured fabrics, and shoes for large sums of money, and that this could be enforced by the addition of certain labels. They manufactured myriads of plastic playthings, chemicals to apply to faces, and more and more clothes that no-one really wears but that lots of people think they want.

Inevitably the people collect the rubbish and their housed fill up. Thus they need bigger houses and more and more of the farmer's land gets bought at extraordinary prices.

So in the end - the money all goes back to the farmer, who now gets paid not to grow anything. Hey I can do that quite easily.

So, as you wander through the January sales, accumulating more debris, just think of the poor farmers, sitting at home waiting for their bank balances to grow.