A Blink of the Screen

more! From now on, unless they are a registered old age pensioner, you will be able to give these people what they richly deserve and they’d better not go and moan to anyone! That’ll teach them!
    What’s the good of being in power unless you use it, that’s what I say. God, I hate these people, the hours I’ve spent standing behind women who open their shopping bags to open another bag to open their handbag to find their purse to find the money to pay— [
Voice off: ‘Are you going to be all night? I’ve got a simple news bulletin here and you’ve been going on for twenty minutes!’
]
    Thank you, good evening.

COO, THEY’VE GIVEN ME THE BIRD

    B ATH AND W EST E VENING C HRONICLE
, 8 A PRIL 1978
    My word, how this brings back memories. When I worked for the
Bath Evening Chronicle,
in the dear old days of long ago, my place of work was a shed – your actual fairly cheap garden shed – which was placed on a flat roof opposite, if I recall correctly, the room that was the workplace for the Tele Ad girls, who I must say did not work in a shed, and especially not my shed, which was so ramshackle that if I moved a useful piece of wood in one corner, I had a direct view of young pigeons in a nest. Sometimes I used to feed them. That was the time when I was doing features and other hack work. Oddly enough, it was a good life if you didn’t mind being constantly surrounded by pigeons. And while I can’t remember much more about it, I must assume that my near neighbours were the inspiration of this little piece
.
    According to the
Radio Times
(so it must be right), the Russians have experimented with using pigeons to do simple production-line jobs in factories …
    DEAR COMRADE CHAIRMAN,
    I would just like to say right at the start that I have been employed here at the Dugvilasgivichski Tool and Die Collective for 12 years and there have never been any complaints. I have never applied for a visa for Israel, I am not now and never have been an intellectual, and I have always kept my production line spotless, you could eat your dinner off it. There is not another man in the place what could say the same or, if I may put it bluntly, there is not in actual point of fact another man 1 in the place.
    Of course I realize that as a humble Factory Hygiene Operative Grade III it is not my job to criticize decisions made higher up the Party machine, not if I don’t want to end up on the wrong side of the Dugvilasgivichski Mental Health Institute anyway, but I cannot help recalling the old days when there were 1,300 other comrade workers here, I mean human beings, I mean I don’t wish this to be interpreted as a criticism of the quality of the work of my current feathered comrades per se.
    I mean, on the production lines all you hear is thousands of little beaks pecking away, that and the rustle of feathers, some days it drives me up the pole. Also take the case of works outings, they used to be very enjoyable, we’d all go out to Nodynoverograd-super-Mare with a few crates of wodka stuck in the back of the coach, only now it’s hard to enjoy yourself when you’re the only chap in 13 coaches and all the rest of your fellow comrade workers are in big wicker hampers. When we get there I have to let them out and then they all fly back home, leaving Joe Joevarich Muggins here with his funny hat and a bag of whelks and a long journey back home on his tod.
    I wouldn’t mind that so much, but when I complained to the Chief Hygiene Operative he just flew away.
    Things aren’t the same in the canteen any more, either. Well, they’re not going to produce 1,300 lunches of mixed corn and just one of caviar-and-chips, are they? No, it’s either sandwiches or up there on the feeding perch with all the rest of them and no moaning or we’ll peck your fingers.
    I will pass over the failing fortunes of the works darts team, the humiliating defeat in the billiards league, the unpleasant encounter with the KGB All-Stars on the football field, and the nasty mess at the international chess championships – and I told the fraternal Chinese delegate not to take his hat off, but of course no one listened.
    I appreciate what it said in
Pravda
about not being capitalist about our fellow creatures, and all that about joining together in the greater unity of all warm-blooded creatures as per true Marxist thinking, also where it said that every pigeon in a factory means another man free to build submarines, but what it boils down to is that