12 Days of Christmas: 5

Tra-la-la! It's a perfect day to visit Gritty Family! In the beautiful, weather ragged landscape of Suffolk!

Imagine, how we can walk by the fields, along the country roads, through the woody patch and into the pub!

We have to imagine it, because by 11am I am tearing open an envelope that tells me my driving licence is expired and the Contact, Capture and Destroy Central Intelligence Unit is threatening me with £1000 fine when I so much as mentally conjure up an accelerator pedal.

I should have ignored that threat, jumped into the car, and driven to Suffolk. Last year the local pub brewed me an excellent non-alcoholic mulled wine, and three of those set me up nicely, about 7,000 calories a glass, but consider it just another sacrifice to make for Christmas with family.

Yes, I should have ignored that letter. What should have alerted me was how it was written: in the spirit and style of the TV licencing 'Enforcement Division'. They too are coming round this afternoon with The Boys to take me to court, smash up my life, and kill my dog*. It doesn't matter that I have a TV licence, that I have previously told them I have a TV licence, and that I pay every month by direct debit. This is of no concern when there are ransom demands to send out to the law-abiding with pictures of dead dogs and bloodied bandages.

But I didn't ignore that letter from the DVLA, those happity-chappity-chums who say, if you drive with an expired licence, we will fine you £1,000, take you to court, smash up your life and kill your dog. I paid attention to it. I went to the website where I am told to go (or pay the Post Office an extra £4.50 for the human contact). At the website, I quickly became trapped in Web-Jail and it took two hours to extract myself before I was confirmed Legal. In other words, I had handed over the appropriate money and was now free to go. Except that it was too late, and my window of opportunity had slid shut.

Several thoughts struck me in the course of this procedure.

1. I wanted to become illegal, take to the highways, go to Suffolk and drink. Therefore what sort of fool had I aged into? Leaping to attend to government instruction? I shall do something about that in 2018.
2. It's probably not even a government department anymore, but Capita and Pearson, our twin-headed corporate overlords and my pet hatreds; they who are charged now with asset-stripping every citizen in the UK to ensure our children are indebted and our grandchildren are sold as slaves.
3. How like Hong Kong is the UK, where citizenry responsibilities are settled by the kerching of a cash register.
4. How fecking awful difficult it must be for people to claim benefits (only available online), and how the system must be designed deliberately to ensure they give up. It took me two hours and I wasn't trying to get anything out of anyone's claws.
5. The Tories are as bad as Labour and they are both desperate to hand over our lives to their corporate chums as they spin round the revolving doors of profit and the lot of them can go to hell in a handcart. Say what? Now I am legal, I'll drive the bastard thing.


*We don't have a dog. Shark keeps a pet fish called Brutus (both Cassius and Julius Caesar died in tragic circumstances), so I suppose dog=fish, it's all the same to the Contact, Capture and Destroy Central Intelligence Unit.