One of the downsides of going out and about during the festive season is the danger of getting stuck next to the sort of person you would normally cross the road to avoid – joggers, estate agents, remoaners.  It’s a worry.  Last night someone bored me for half an hour with his views on “the oppressed poor”.  Nothing patronising about that attitude. Normally we British nod and smiled wanly at these types and practice irregular Latin verbs in our heads to make the time pass more swiftly but on this occasion I wasn’t in the mood for lily livered nonsense.

”Are you aware that in X, a typical London borough, it is a FACT that one third of people don’t pay any council tax, thereby putting it up 50% for the rest of us? The police estimate that one in ten cars on the road has no road tax and therefore no insurance, the consequences of which also fall on those who do. Every day gas, electricity and water companies try to collect unpaid bills from people who have moved on without leaving a forwarding address, providing that the debtors have had their Human Rights letter first. (And I’m not making that up!)  Ditto with TV licences. That’s not oppression. That,  sweetie, is theft.”

There are children starting school who are not toilet trained, have never held a knife and fork, a book or a pencil,  who can’t speak in sentences. And it impacts on your child who’s in the same class.  I don’t care if you send them all to Eton; they won’t all come out the same because some of them are already 18 months behind by the time they start school. That’s not oppression. It’s bad parenting.

And spare me your thoughts on evil companies who don’t pay tax.  Does the government, of whatever persuasion, do anything about it? No doubt you use Google and Amazon and banks so you are part of the problem.  If you hate them so much why don’t you boycott them and bombard your M.P with letters of complaint? In fact, become an M.P yourself.  Do something!

As for the latest Blue Planet-inspired hatred for plastics in the sea, the overwhelming majority of it comes from just 10 rivers and none of them are anywhere near Europe so putting a deposit on my recyclable bottle of orange juice is going to make precisely bugger all difference and it’s not actually my fault.”

I hope I made myself clear.  Unless you are personally working on a solution I don’t want to hear that the problems of the world all directly attributable to me and my opinions.  The Complaints Department is closed for the holidays.