Put your trust in the Tooth Fairy

SO THIS quantitative easing we’ve been hearing about. What’s that all about then?

As I understand it, it means that the Royal Mint will run off loads of new banknotes in an attempt to kick-start the economy, but what happens to the money once they’ve printed it? How does it get into the hands of the likes of you and me?

As ever, it appears that it doesn’t. I think they’re just intending to give wads of cash to the now State-owned banks, who will use it to it to pay their miserably-failing bosses huge bonuses while continuing to withdraw the overdraft facilities of small businesses. So unless you’re a Ferrari dealer or an expensive Russian escort (one’s a car, the other isn’t) you’re unlikely to see a penny of this new money.

I have an idea. Why don’t we enlist the Tooth Fairy to ensure a fair distribution of all this cash? And let’s not stop at tucking tenners under pillows. Let’s hide money in McDonald’s napkin dispensers, railway train seatbacks, Tesco carrier bags and behind park benches. Tucked into the pages of the Daily Star and inside Greggs’ pasty cartons. In packets of Silk Cut Purple and under hedges in lay-bys (traditional home – before the Internet - of lorry driver porn mags).

Come on Gordon, that kind of redistribution of wealth would really kick-start the economy. And cheer everyone up as well.

SPEAKING of McDonald’s, and whatever the eco-protesters say, now and then you just have to succumb to the lure of the Golden Arches. And now they’re all made out of organic food grown by pretty people in their flower-strewn allotments (well that’s what it says on TV), then there’s no guilt attached either.

I had my most recent MacAttack last week. Quarter Pounder with cheese and a large fries since you ask. Black coffee, six sachets of sugar. As usual, the five-star kid who served me had acne of Krakatoa proportions and there was a tramp in the corner arguing that it might be 10.31am but he still wanted an Egg McMuffin to go with his Special Brew, but what I hadn’t bargained for were the number of fat kids spending their half term holiday not only eating between Happy Meals but actually eating between snacks.

It was a real struggle just getting to the counter through this waist-high tide of pre-pubescent porkers. It was like walking through quicksand. Strawberry shake-flavoured quicksand.

It appears that the problem of obese children has now got so bad that last week one expert demanded that gastric bands should be fitted to all porkers aged over 15. Well, hang on a minute. I may have hit on a radical solution to this problem. Why not just stop them stuffing their faces while spending sedentary hours in front of the telly or the Nintendo? Encourage them to get some exercise. Make them EAT THEIR GREENS. It’s not rocket science, is it?

When I were a lad (and it was all fields around here), I used to come home from school, get hit with a ruler because my tie wasn’t done up, be handed a slice of bread and dripping and sent back out on the paper round. Either that or onto the park for a 37-a-side game of Next Goal’s The Winner.

If, in a moment of madness, I’d wandered up to the larder and helped myself to its contents, I’d have been locked in the coal cellar until Christmas. These days kids waddle in from school, stock up on an armful of e-numbers and a Bacardi Breezer and park their vast bulk in front of the idiot box to watch the soft porn on satellite. And it’s not entirely their fault. Not even those whose parents bleat: “It’s their glands.”

For a start, successive governments have allowed the wholesale selling-off of school playing fields. Lazy, anti-elitist teachers reluctant to run sports teams and greedy head-teachers eager to take the builders’ shilling to fund their next black, bicycling lesbian outreach worker to teach 3C that “men are evil and middle-class white men are even more evil” are all complicit in this scandal.

The compensation culture also plays a part. Mr Jennings is unlikely to take his class on a field trip to Malham Cove if he thinks he’s going to be sued senseless if little Damien slips and cuts his knee on an aggressive, if ancient, ammonite.

Consequently, organised school sports or outdoor activities are virtually non-existent, which might come as a relief to those of us who had to do cross-country running in our grubby Y-fronts because we’d forgotten our kit, but also neglects a vital aspect of life’s education, namely that team sports provide a very good early lesson as to what lies ahead. Namely, you lose more often than you win.

And then there’s the climate of fear we create around our kids. In my largely car-free village it’s a rare, if welcome, sight to see children playing out unsupervised. Too many parents are simply paranoid. Is there really a child-molester on every street corner? I don’t think so. Uncle Jimmy might be a little careless with his hands when it comes to the piggy-back rides, but surely that’s just part of life’s rich pageant?

I’ll tell you what really worries me. Here we are, with British soldiers under daily attack in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we’re breeding kids who daren’t set foot across the doorstep in case they’re menaced by an empty crisp bag blowing down the street. Where are the soldiers of the future, willing to march bravely through Luton while half a dozen Muslim extremists call them cowards, murders and rapists? Answer me that.