First, read this.

My inner geek reads this and thinks, “Cool! I want one!”

The bloke in me thinks, “Excellent! I can read the paper on the way to work (over 50 miles each way) and have a pint before ‘driving’ home.”

However, I also love driving. And I think that by the time my kids are old enough to learn to drive, they won’t be allowed to. As Arthur C Clarke once said (and I’m sorry, but I can’t remember where) it won’t be long before “driving a car on the public roads” will be illegal.

We have had a dangerously active social life for a week now.

A romantic candlelit dinner for two; a boisterous night out with an old friend and his new partner; an afternoon at a friend’s house; even the theatre!

How have we managed this?

We dumped the kids.

Two were sent to grandma’s, and the third went to respite.

All good things come to an end, though. People have been returning our children and complaining about Autistic breakdowns and shattered televisions…

Back to the grindstone.

Read this.

If you don’t get it, then you’re part of the problem.

(P.S. Thank you, Busyknitter, for the great link!)

Last night I had a doorstep? chat with a neighbour and discovered a shared passion: hatred of the all-devouring cult of Political Correctness.

She had just got back from a seminar in which all the ‘students’ were shown a film as part of somebody’s research into misunderstandings about race relations. The film included lots of Fawlty Towers style high farce in which a character howled in embarrassment after unwittingly asking an Afro-British waiter for ‘black coffee,’ asking his new lesbian neighbours if they want ‘lemons’ in their G&Ts, and telling a Muslim work colleague that he was an atheist, but not ‘fanatical’ about it. Apparently it was excruciating.

What made it worse was the assumption behind the study – that the reason no-one laughed was because no-one truly understands racial integration and the foundations of racial harmony. And therefore needed re-educating…

Actually, the real reason why no-one laughed is because the people behind the cult of PC are po-faced, self important busybodies with too much time on their hands and a catastrophic sense of humour failure. They couldn’t write a funny joke if they tried – they would spend too much time consulting committees, policies and ethical statements and not enough time paying due regard to the fact that, in order to be funny, a joke needs to violate someone’s principles. It doesn’t matter who’s. Jokes are funny because they don’t conform to the rules.

Ranting aside, the real problem is that Politically Correct thinking fails to remember a universal truth that? was first established? when Oliver Cromwell’s corpse was dug up from Westminster Abbey and hanged at Tyburn: you cannot legislate in a free society? for opinion or morality.

The offense that this researched inflicted upon my neighbour had nothing to do with her opinions, actions? or moral? fibre but, as in all cases of institutionalised morality, on her failure to demonstrate her credentials to join the “in” group.

I know that I am not in the “in” group. I am a parent, carer and teacher of children with Autism – but I prefer to use the old-fashioned labels of “mentally disabled” and “Autism Spectrum Disorder” rather than “learning difficulty” and “Autism Spectrum Condition.” And, most crucially, I have never been “on a course”. (Actually, that’s not true – it’s just that my course didn’t tell me all about Autism and how? to provide opportunities for people with Autism in an inclusive society. My course told me how to stop my students from grabbing hold of my wedding tackle and ripping it off, and how to restrain them from killing their classmates without breaking the law and ending up on the front page of the Daily Mail.)

No-one who deals with the raw edge of prejudice of any kind could ever have dreamt up Political Correctness. It’s not a practical solution. It only works in committee meetings and at seminars; and it only makes sense to people whose professional and personal lives are neatly compartmentalised.

For the rest of us, who regard meetings and seminars for the self-congratulatory bullshit that they are, and who live on the fault lines between races, abilities and classes, PC is a voracious, insatiable monster that prevents people from looking at the real problems.

Darling Wifey & I have set up a powerful wireless network at home (not hackable, I am afraid – we manually add machines to the access list, rather than allow ‘open’ access.) It is one of the benefits of staying at the best B&B in York, and kind of? compensates visitors? for the lingering smells wafting from Little Nutter’s room even after it has been de-toxed, Vaxed, Febrezed and hermetically sealed.

In theory, we can sit anywhere in the house with our laptops and work sociably – but I am getting more and more used to working on my new Apple in the bedroom (did I mention that Apples are to PCs what ballpoints &? Basildon Bond? are to a hammer & chisel & lump of rock?)

But the really sad, geeky thing we do is send each other Instant Messages even when we are in the same room.

I’ll stop prevaricating around the bush: we send those IMs that, well, married people might send so that the children can’t hear what they are really talking about. You know the ones – stuff that make your 9-year-old daughter shout “EEwwwwwwww” at and your 4-year-old son repeats innocently to his teachers.

Now we get to the point. I sent such a message to Darling Wifey this evening. Twice. And it never arrived. I think I sent it to the right person, but if you received an indecent proposition from me this evening, do bear in mind that it was intended for my wife.

If you’re male, I can only apologise. If you’re female, let’s talk…

We bought a tray of eggs from a farm shop this evening.

30 enormous, free-range, poo & feather encrusted cackleberries were carried back into the car.

The children were delighted. “One egg!” shouted Little Nutter as he fastened his seat belt. “Two egg!” “Three egg!” (I think you get the picture.)

“Yummy yummy in my tummy!” shouted Tiny Flirt.

“Can we grow them into chickens?” asked Little Madam.

“No,” I said, not thinking. “They haven’t been fertilised.” Darling Wifey put her head in her hands.

“What’s fertilised?”

I looked at Darling Wifey in despair. The expression on her face said, plainly and simply, ‘you’re on your own, sunshine.’

“Urm, eggs only hatch into chicks when there is a chicken seed inside them.”

The pause lasted several minutes… then,

“Why is Mummy laughing?”

The next question is imminent. We don’t know when, but she will ask it soon.

Edited to add:

On Friday my blog will celebrate its fourth birthday. 440 entries in 1461 days (one of those years was a Leap Year.)

How should I celebrate my blogday?

Last night my computer died. Horribly. Not that computers normally die well, or soliloquise poetically about their unrealised dreams and ambitions, but I was still disappointed.

You would imagine that a computer with the Network ID “Deep Thought” would leave you with some profound last words. But it didn’t.

It just sat there displaying the Blue Screen of Death, with a single lame cursor flashing pathetically. F10 System Restore did nothing. My specially made “emergency boot disk” just buzzed away like a defibrillator being applied about 24 hours too late.

Thankfully my habit of saving everything onto two USB drives means I didn’t lose any work… but our iTunes account was also on that machine. It’s going to be a nuisance restoring that lot…

Anyway, Darling Wifey came up with a neat solution – and I spent our savings on an Apple Mini Mac. This is a box about the same size as Two Seasons of Buffy DVDs. My old tower unit (which was the size of a suitcase) has been replaced with a box the same size as a Cardboard McBig carton.

And after just two hours, I’m converted. Even after twenty years of using Microsoft operating systems, the Mac OS just makes more sense.

Now – how do I convert my iPod without losing 8 days of music…?