When in doubt, bring back the birch: or as the Romans put it, “qui bene amat, bene castigat” – if you love someone, give them a thrashing. I try to explain this to Carrie but she gets the completely the wrong end of the stick, so it is sofa time again.
Anyway my perfectly sensible idea is to make sure wicked criminals stay in prison at a cost to the state of £27,264 per person per year, or somewhat more than the average wage, I’m told. Which must be wrong, since most MPs can’t manage on £74,000. Make them serve the sentence they are given! Priti agrees, and has some interesting ideas about bringing back the treadmill, rock-breaking, and ball-busting. Whatever that means.
In an effort to placate Carrie over the wretched misunderstanding regarding my rather erudite little joke about flagellation, I suggest a weekend in Tuscany might be just the thing to restore our spirits, rejuvenate the juices and put some spice back into our you-know-what.
Little Dominic blows a gasket and forbids it. No hols, no weekend hanky-panky, not even a day trip to St Albans. Berserk, he closes Kings Cross station and sends round a memo to all Downing St staff about “going to the mattresses” until the election. The one we’re not having. Allegedly.
It’s all very well for him. He doesn’t do holidays. He just sits in a bunker his parents built to house him on their farm in Durham and reads Schopenhauer and Hayek until the full moon has passed. His wife stays up the road, haunting the family castle, Chillblains. Northern Gothic, I think is the phrase.
In vengeance over the holiday ban, I telephone the Guardian and tell them Cummings gets twenty big ones a year from the EU for doing nothing at all on the farm. That’s Euro Gothic, that is.
Pyramid of Piffle 