The Steaming Rants of Ernie Wight

Sacred Cows

I hit an owl the other morning, I'm ashamed to say. It suddenly rose into the glare of the left-hand beam from the carcass on the road where it had been perching before I came rattling along out of the gloom. It thumped into the windscreen and spiralled off into the darkness again, while I sped on in the opposite direction. Later on, as daylight came, a passing motorist saw it sprawled out in the verge by the hedge, fluttering a wing helplessly, and stopped to rescue it and take it to the nearest wildlife sanctuary. While he was carefully wrapping the angry owl in his jacket, a van swerved to avoid his car, and a car travelling on the opposite direction was forced to brake hard, and was hit lightly in the boot by a following car. Details were quickly exchanged, but the delay to the driver of the following car was enough to mean he missed his flight from Bristol airport by ten minutes. This in turn meant that he could not keep a meeting with an insignificant late-fifties looking man and pass him a folder containing money, and instructions to assassinate a despotic ruler of a middle African state. By an even stranger turn of fortune, that very day the despotic ruler of the middle African state issued instructions to have a concerned businessman within the middle African state meet with an unfortunate letter-bomb, and the assassin who was contracted to do the job was the very same insignificant late-fifties looking man that the concerned businessman in question had just failed to make the appointment with. It was a good thing that I hit the owl and not a butterfly, the resulting hurricanes would have wiped out most of the Caribbean Islands and condemned West Africa to ten more years of devastating drought. I have enough to answer for already without Ethiopia and Somalia being laid at my door. I have lately begun to wonder about the units of chaos. Are there finite elements into which the randomness of the world can be decomposed? Is the unit of chaos (called a chao, pronounced cow), more than just a figment of the Discordian imagination ?

Cows, of course, are the mothers of all white stuff, and as such are sacred to us carriers. I met several of them loose along a back road one morning, and used the van to block the road and herd them back to an open gateway. After persuading the last one to go through the gate I closed it securely, and left it to the farmers to work out whose cows shouldn't have been in whose fields when they finally got out of bed. Keep chaos off the roads and cows in the fields.

The white stuff has a bewildering range of units. I carry pints, two pints, half-gallons, pergals, litres, two-litres, and 500 millilitres for those drinkers of the red white stuff who believe that they are really pints. To make it worse, the weights differ with the colour. Blue white stuff is the heaviest, then green, and red white stuff is little more than water with some chalk dissolved in it. The units vary according to locale. In the countryside, the shops take pints only, but in the towns they prefer to sell by litres, although the pint still persists as the minimum quantity in both areas. It trips off the tongue nicely. Cows have no concept of these units at all, they measure white stuff by the udderfull, and are happy to perform their little bit on behalf of universal entropy, redistributing green stuff.

My green stuff has been redistributed, but not as white stuff. I now get green stuff for distributing white stuff. I used to get quite a nice amount of green stuff, which I redistributed as I saw fit, some to local businesses, some to large national concerns such as British Telecom, The Inland Revenue, HM Customs and Excise, and a considerable portion to the oil companies. I still have to think in old units - I drive miles, and burn gallons. A Scimitar, driven carefully, might do 25 miles to the gallon. I therefore burn up two gallons a day driving to and from the dairy. After paying tax and national insurance, I drive home with £27.50 for a six-hour day (night) delivering white stuff. But of course, I have to put petrol in the car, about £7 a day. What is infuriating is that this £7 is mostly tax, as the fuel blockaders tried to bring to our attention. In fact, about £1 of it is VAT, and of the remainder, a large proportion is again tax, levied by the government, and regularly increasing from budget to budget. Town dwellers can get to work by bike and bus, but out in the country I have no choice but to drive. Yes, I know, I can read your mind, I could get a more economical car. Well, as it happens, no I can't. I would have to find the money to buy the car. Assume that the car would cost £400, and would do 35 miles to the gallon, (I am using June's old Scirocco as the example here). The saving in fuel costs amounts to about £12 per week, so it would take 33 weeks before the savings in fuel costs covered the purchase of the car. Some of you also might argue that I shouldn't have been running around in such a petrol-guzzling car in the first place, but that is ignoring the fact that my subsidiary business is selling spares for those cars.

The Transit also needs fuel, and nobody at the dairy told me that there was a credit card available for purchases. I several times filled up using my own debit card, and claimed the fuel cost back from the dairy. It took several days to actually get the money from them, and during this period, my well-overdrawn account triggered off something in the bank's computer programs. I was checking the bank statements for the period when I had paid both an electric bill and the council tax, and noticed two unexplained drawings of £20. I had been charged these for exceeding the overdraft limit by more than a certain amount. The bank's central adviser said that they were allowed to do this to me up to three times in any one month. I called my local branch, and was able to get to talk to someone who did know me, ( I pay my cheques in there several times a month). I explained that on the two days in question, my six hours hard wet labour has earned me 50 pence per night, after paying petrol and charges. They very kindly reversed the transactions and put the £40 back into my account. I am glad that Barclays had kept the Shaftesbury branch open, and does take the time to know their customers.

The relief of getting the fines reversed was short-lived. The next day I arrived home late and soaked to the skin, to find a summons from Salisbury District Council waiting for me. The charge was that I was the person liable to pay the council tax levied on the Station, and that I owed them over two hundred pounds, still due to be paid in four more monthly installments. I checked the bank statements again, fearing that a cheque had been bounced, but all had been debited against my account. The summons advised me that non-appearance would be construed as acceptance. I will have to attend, and ask if I can pay the outstanding amount by installments. Would I get an extra fine on top of the summons cost for contempt of court, I wondered? Was I eligible for legal aid? If I was sent to prison, who would feed the cats, and who would steer a rattling Transit through the flooded lanes to get the white stuff out on time ?

The impending summons ensured that I did not have a pleasant weekend, feeling that I had been and would forever more be subsidising local and central governments far too much. The pit was not bottomless, but on minimum wages would take more than my remaining lifetime to escape from. Life might well be a game of snakes and ladders, but it's no fun when there are no ladders on the bottom level. John Dillinger might have died for you, the Fuel Blockaders might have struck for you, but Ernie Wight is driving for nothing, and giving it all away to the thousands of deserving poor that the government has to look after.

Redistribution of wealth begins at the bottom, not at the top.