This morning, while walking the dog, I met a man who told me his son had bought a puppy for his young daughter, on the provision that she stopped sucking her thumb. This flummoxed me for a while, so I asked him if she were to suck the dog instead. He either mis-heard me or has a propensity for throwing punches at strangers. Thankfully, even I can knock a man down in his eighties, especially with a walking stick. And that's when the trouble started. A brutish pair of lads were standing idly by and sought to intervene. Not wishing any further punches to be thrown in my direction, I suggested to the boys the man had made improper suggestions to me, pointing to a hedge and throwing my hips slightly forward rhythmically. Well I ask you, is the whole world deaf? How can these barely literate thugs have misconstrued my defence for beating the old codger? Did they really think I wanted to engage in lewd acts with them? Or were they just angry that I had hit their grandad? I'll never know unfortunately, because they beat me so viciously I'm in a permanent vegetative state.

Here I am creating an answer sheet for English Homework exercises. Exercise 5 - Analogies; Cat is to Kitten as Dog is to … Well of course the children are meant to write puppy, but a far more creative and mischievous pupil would instantly see the fun to be had here. Cat is to Kitten as dog is to eat both, Cat is to kitten as dog is to shit, Cat is to kitten as dog is to be put down children, it has cancer. Holy christ, spare me from the belief that English is somehow ordered and based on principles and systems. There really is nothing more unprincipled and disordered and unsystematic than we English. In ALDI I saw a boy lean out of the trolley at an angle of greater than 45 degrees, defying physics, to steal some sweets, while his mother bellowed into a mobile phone. The woman can speak to satellites yet she cannot speak to her own child. The child can perform gravity defying acrobatics and steal with graceful impunity, yet it cannot read, speak or prevent its own baby teeth from turning into black and rotting stumps. This is what English culture is, a black and rotting stump of a begging child's tooth, while our government bellow lies into mobile phones to Andy Coulson, Rebecca Brookes, the NSA and Angela Merkle's Auntie Agatha from Aachen. Aaaagghhh.