Questions from the edge.

My neighbour had mislaid his carving knife. He had six people coming for a roast dinner and he was panicking. I offered to lend him mine, took it out of the kitchen drawer and went down the path to his house.
On the way I happened to meet a policeman (a rare event, true). "What's that you're holding?" he demanded. "Well, it's a knife," I said.
"Then I have to arrest you," he said, taking me by the arm. "Don't you know you could get two years in prison for this?"
I protested slightly as I was dragged off to the station. "But if it isn't illegal to buy a knife, how can it be illegal to carry one? You can't carry guns without a licence. But buying knives is legal; shouldn't we start to have licences for them?
So, you might need 10 licences to run a normal kitchen drawer.
A partly invented incident of course. But it could happen.

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So, the government is producing money so that we can choose where we die. Not many people are going to choose hospital, because hospitals are only too eager to get their patients to quit their beds, so it might not be a safe choice.ds Most people would prefer home, but would newly-promised State helpers turn up on time? My favourite place to die would be Capri in summer: must remember to tell the government.

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We hear very often about the problems of obesity in this country. So mightn't it be a good thing if the price of food is going up? And if the price of meat is too high to buy, then let's stop eating it and help to rescue the climate as well as the unfortunate animals exported live or dragged up and down the country in a search for cheap abbatoirs. And stop drinking milk altogether, we don't need it. Then the cows would be spared a hideous life inside sheds with stone flooring forced into endless calving to produce huge amounts of milk for sale. The calves are taken away soon after birth, and put into trucks to travel for many hours. The UK exports around 100,000 calves each year and regulations allow them to be transported for 19 hours. It is time this trade was stopped - it's vile, not tasty veal.
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Have we stopped caring about the real workers in this country? The most regularly important people for me are the guys who are out collecting my throwaway black plastic bags before I'm even out of bed in a morning, the ones making sure the lights work, the water stays flowing and clean, the streets cleaned. Yesterday I met two guys toiling away, clearing the overgrown ditches and hedges in the heat of the day. One of them was at least 60. I wondered whether they were among those whom Gordon Brown includes in his list of people realising their "full potential." New Labour has never stopped sermonising about people needing to rise up the ladder, and work hard to better themselves. We never seemed to hear about the workers, the ones doing the hard and unseen jobs which keep the country going. Whatever happened to praise for the proletariat? Instead, among politicians and journalists as well as almost everyone else, a firm line is drawn between "middle-class" and "working-class" with an obvious implication of which one is superior. For example, the emergence of a "middle-class" in China is taken as indicative of a rise in China's prestige, even in spite of its executions, imprisonments of writers for unideological thoughts, and totalitarian government.
Could someone please explain to me what defines a middle-class person and separates that person from a working-class one, particularly now most of our factories and mines have closed down? I'd really like to know.
Now workers have come out on strike, quarter of a million of them making only £6 an hour while they see public service bosses get huge salaries.
And it's just possible that some of this united mass are middle-class. They include librarians. Are they middle-class? And, if so, why?

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