Work without end.

Work’s a strange thing. You want it to end but you don’t want it to finish, because then you’d be out of a job. If someone invented everlasting paint, painting the Forth Bridge wouldn’t be a job for life any more. But then everlasting paint has been shelved by paint manufacturers because they would be out of a job too. So it’s vitally important that one invents work during the long years waiting for retirement. In fact putting back the age of retirement will make the country less efficient as the whole work force will have to spend far more time inventing work than they do now to fill the extra years.
Now the legislature started work around 1300 with Edward II and it’s been inventing work ever since. That’s 700 years of painting the Forth Bridge. So if the legislature had been painting the Forth Bridge it would be four times its original weight and there would be barely enough room for the traffic down the middle by now.
In fact it’s been calculated that putting all the volumes of Hansard into one big pile would be Britain’s best chance of putting a geo stationary satellite in orbit. Just climb up the side with a rucksack. This though is impracticable.
It does though suggest we have enough laws to sink the Forth Bridge together with the unfortunate ship passing under it at the time. But the golden rule of work must be obeyed; especially as it’s unlikely the legislature could be successfully retrained as a plumber. So new laws must continue to be drafted for ever and ever until Doomsday Book II, The Sequel, is published.
Which brings me to the point of this item. A law is currently going through parliament that stipulates if a child is to be educated at home it must be Ofsted inspected and its parents CRB checked. Now home education is a middle class thing, where Toby and Leonora spend happy hours with mum, Clare, making plasticine numerals. I wonder then if the implicit assumption, that said Clare, a trusted and loving evening parent, might turn into a sex offending, drug dealing, knife carrying daytime parent, is entirely justified. Or might it just be the legislature making work for itself to continue in gainful employment? I fear the traffic is beginning to scrape along the walls of solid paint.