Showers, moderate becoming cabbages later

... Channel Light Vessel Automatic: south west variable 3 or 4, 1012 falling slowly, showers, good...

You know you are up far, far too early when the comforting ritual words of the Shipping Forecast are on Radio 4 as you drive to the station. So why am I up at crack of sparrow-fart today. Well for a start it's August and that means everyone on the team who has rugrats absolutely must have a couple of weeks off with their spawn. Consequently those that don't like me end up holding the fort whilst the Project Manager, Team Lead and one of the senior developers bugger off en famille to Lanzagrotty, Disney World in an American Swamp or Bournemouth respectively. Even the intern has buggered off for the week as he needs to resit a couple of exams he cocked up. So its down to me to be the "senior manager" (hah!) on the ground to mop the fevered brows of our traders should they take a dislike to the particular shading of an "OK" button on any of our applications this morning.

So there I am on the train, another wage slave, with a few other bleary-eyed companions trundling through Cambridgeshire in some clapped-out carriage we'll all have to pay 13% more for next year.

Now I don't know if you know the area between Ely and Cambridge, it's called "The Fens" and up until the 1800's it was just marsh, bog and shifting rivers. Then the happy collision of a clever Cloggie called Vermuiden and a load of free labour in the shape of prisoners of war from the little spat we were having with Napoleon came together to construct drainage channels (and these are no mere ditches, one is called "The Hundred Foot River" because that's how wide it is, it's 18 miles long and straight as a die, you can see it from space) and turned the area into fertile, productive land to feed the growing cities of the 19th century.

It was this I was bimbling through now. Flat as a pancake and acre upon acre of every kind of salad crop you can think of. It was before 6am and already there is plenty of activity; these big rectangular tents on wheels moving back and forth which house the pickers and packers working the rows of lettuce.

And I can tell you now every single of those will be from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, anywhere but here.

I don't begrudge them the work, they work bloody hard; the ones I've met in the market towns around here, Wisbech, Downham Market, Ely, are all polite and don't cause any bother.

But why the hell am I paying for a whole fecking underclass of zero-achievement ferals who have a sense of entitlement but no sense of responsibility who right now are tucked up in bed sleeping off the booze, dope and a hard night's looting of the local branch of JD Sports whilst I'm hauling my green scaly tail into London at 5 in the bleeding morning? There's work out there, tons of it, but it's been done by the aforementioned Eastern Europeans. Take a look at this from the Telegraph today

This is just not bloody on. If the state is to have a role here it is as a facilitator and broker. You have no job but you are fit and healthy, well here's a job, 50 hours a week picking cabbages. Here's your bus fare, your new employer will sort out some temporary housing.

What's that? It's demeaning? How are you supposed to use your DJing and Hip Hop dance skills in a cabbage field? Well fucking boo-hoo, let me call the whaaaaaambulance for you. Walk off the job and no money for you matey.

But you're unemployable because you perpetually skipped school and the only way you know how to talk is in a language that is a cross between pseudo Jamaican patois and the sounds a rutting pig makes? Just how much do you need to communicate to be able to pick a lettuce?


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PS: Welcome to everyone who's arriving here from Old Holborn's blog and a big thanks to the masked maker of mischief and all-round thorn in the side of government for the link.

Dear President Hu

Hello Mr President. Mr President? Oh there you are down there, sorry I was expecting someone taller.

Anyway this is an open letter from us in the Fens to you about climate change. We notice with alarm that you are going to put economic development over reducing greenhouse gases which as you know are leading to global warming, superbugs, rampant botty-sex and there never being anything decent on the TV of a saturday evening.

To us living in the Fens global warming is not merely a theory, it is a cold, hard fact that nobody is allowed to argue with at all. Most of this winter it was so wet that I couldn't get to the pub without a boat Your actions in China directly affect us here in Soggy Bottom. You may say that we in the fens are far away and very few, and you would be right, but that doesn't stop us moaning and whining about our special rights to be here as we have been here since the 17th century when this cloggie came over and...

...err...

... built a load of sea defences and clever drainage channels and sluices so that what was a huge fucking mass of shifting, flooded silty marsh became useful farmland and habitable villages where the sea didn't come in the front door every winter.

Hey, if we could do it with picks and shovels and a clever Dutch guy back then think what we could do now!

Hey Mr Hu, keep on keeping on. We'll keep going with the cheapie holidays too, we might even send some of our pissed up lager louts over to you, you're missing a trick there - you should rebrand Beijing as the must-go-to stag weekend destination.