The Prince and the Pot Noodle

A MAN could get seriously depressed should he set aside time to consider the many dangers that threaten our cosy little existence.

Politically-correct policemen, lying politicians, incompetent teachers. Soaring crime, rampant drug addiction, soft sentencing and overcrowded prisons. Social workers. Socialism. The return of Supermarket Sweep to tea-time television. Racism, road pricing and Robert Kilroy-Silk. The Turkey Army. Turkey Twizzlers. Turkey’s entry to the European Union. Muslim extremism, Morris dancing, moray eels. Health and safety, Ainsley Harriott, Audley Harrison. The Welsh. And some bloke in his bedroom stuffing bangers into Jiffy bags.

There’s just a few to be getting on with. But I would never, ever, have pointed the finger at that archetypal ingredient of British suburbia, the cul-de-sac.

OK, it’s got a French name, and that’s got to be wrong, but apart from that what horrors could possibly lie in a dead end of semi-detached houses?

Step forward, HRH the Prince of Wales, who this week besmirched the innocent cul-de-sac as an environmental menace that fostered crime, car dependence and obesity.

It appears that Charlie has persuaded some of Britain’s biggest housebuilders, including Barratt, George Wimpey and Bovis Homes, to bin suburban closes in favour of higher density “Victorian-style grids”. One of his advisers (his name is Hank, so get that pinch of salt ready) explains that many cul-de-sac dwellers routinely burn a litre of petrol on a shopping trip to buy a litre of milk by the time they’ve made their way out of the estate maze to get to the nearest shop.

Another Yank, Dr Richard Jackson, claims that cul-de-sac dwellers weigh on average 6lb more than residents of traditional towns. He fails to acknowledge that town people weigh less because they’re constantly running away from knife-wielding muggers, but there we go.

I don’t know about this. First of all, how often do you see HRH the Prince of Wales nipping down to the corner shop in his slippers for a tube of Pringles and a Pot Noodle? Secondly, cul-de-sacs are relatively safe from crime. Even the cops recognise this. By the time your scally burglar has run the gauntlet of twitching net curtains on his way to that open bedroom window at Number 23, the switchboard at the local nick is in meltdown and the police helicopter is already hovering overhead.

Yes, they’ve inflicted upon us soaring leylandii, wife-swapping and those blokes who dress in stocking-and-suspender aprons and hover over their barbecues on summer weekends, but is that all bad? No cars zoom past your house at 90mph, your kids are relatively safe playing out in the street, and if your marital experience is suffering from bedroom boredom there’s always that minx four doors away who you can see sunbathing nude in her conservatory. If you use binoculars. And lean out of the bedroom window a bit.

Nope, you’ve got this one wrong, Chas. Best talk it through with the tulips.

SO IF I told you that we were expecting four inches of snow overnight, you’d dig the wellies out of the garage, remember to put a vest on, and look forward to the slippy and slidey journey to work as some kind of adventure.

If I was to tell you that 10 centimetres were expected, then you’d put masking tape over your windows, retreat to the cellar with the catering size can of beans and sausage, and load the shotgun ready for the looters to come calling.

Of course it’s all the same. I think of it as a private sector versus public sector sort of thing. Four inches of private sector snow means that most of us struggle to work, the shops stay open and capitalism continues uninterrupted.

Ten centimetres of public sector snow means that thousands of schools are shut, the binmen and the postman daren’t venture out without incurring the wrath of the union, and every single accounts department in the country is at home watching the scrotes taking DNA tests on the Jeremy Kyle Show.

I blame the BBC. If only they had the bottle to use proper imperial measurements in their weather forecasts instead of propagating that foreign muck, we’d have shrugged off a few snowflakes and got on with our lives, instead of battening down the hatches and succumbing to cowardly chaos.

NOW WE all know, without a doubt, that you can’t catch bird flu by eating properly cooked poultry. But that didn’t stop the middle classes hovering nervously around the organic chicken section at Waitrose on Saturday. For those who did take the plunge, perhaps they were reassured by the fact that their bird had led a happy and fulfilling life and now, in death, was now costing them a cool £15.

No such luxury for the shoppers at Lidl. In there people were buying what they could afford to feed to their families, not what a combination of fashion and fear dictated. Pound shop chicken is the staple diet of the nation’s poor. So there’s no point in the rest of us bemoaning the factory farming methods that produce cheap meat unless we can provide people with the financial means to pay for something a bit better. And that’s as well as buying their daily ration of cooking lager.

WE’RE ALREADY being persecuted by council parking attendants, dog muck mercenaries and loitering litter wardens: now another breed of heavy-handed high-visibility jacket wearers is about to descend upon us – yes, it’s the Smoke Police.

Local councils are to be given an astonishing £30million a year to recruit staff to patrol the cafes, clubs and pubs after July 1st this year to hand out £50 spot fines to illegal smokers and grass up publicans and café owners to the magistrates. They will be equipped with secret cameras and will be allowed to go undercover.

There are two reasons why this is a criminal waste of money. Firstly, most smokers are reasonable people who will adhere to the ban; secondly, those smokers who aren’t reasonable and who flout the ban will be either drunk or aggressive, in which case Joey Yellow Jacket won’t be going anywhere near them in the first place.

And finally, we turn to Scotland, where one council has employed two full-time Turkey Army soldiers at a cost of around £60,000 a year to impose the ban. In the past year, they have issued four –yes, that’s FOUR – warnings to transgressors and no – yes, that’s NO – fines. Even I can work out that that’s £15,000 per warning: a splendid use of public money, I’m sure you’ll agree.