I'd rather not have chips with everything!

 

I’D RATHER NOT HAVE

 CHIPS WITH EVERYTHING!

 

IT’S bad enough that they’re taking over our offices, but when they begin to breed in our own living rooms, it’s about time something was done. 

The Mighty Micro is turning our children into crushing technobores - home computer maniacs who adore “chips” with everything. 

At one time kids were content with TV and pop music, played the odd game of Monopoly or Subbuteo and spent hours constructing cranes with their Meccano sets. 

Nowadays they are Lords of the Universe, zapping dragons and monsters from the Planet Tharg into oblivion. At the age of seven they’re devising their own game programs while teenagers are now running  their own companies! 

 

By the time they’re adults they can wipe out an entire army of Earthlings one by one purely by sending them to sleep with lethal bursts of computer jargon. 

I blame the parents. They only buy their sprogs these hi-tech toys because next door’s got one or they think it might keep little Johnny out of borstal. Yet they always pretend it’s educational. 

Quite what crash-landing jumbo jets or nuking aliens all day teaches a four-year-old is unclear. Unless, of course, a GCSE in Nintendo is now a standard requirement by present-day employers! 

 _______________________________________________________________

GETTING THE HUMP

For more than three months now motorists mad enough to venture down Mill Road in Kettering have been treated to a ridiculous roller coaster ride over road humps. 

Wise drivers now avoid the area like the plague, but I can’t help thinking Access Only signs and a simple chicane at either end would have had the same desired effect - and saved an awful lot of OUR money!

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL SAUCE! 

IT REALLY gets up my nose when miserly, money-grabbing restaurants charge you 10p or more for a sachet of tomato sauce or mustard (which you can never open without being splattered anyway). 

And it’s pretty outrageous when profiteering pubs have the barefaced cheek to demand anything up to 25p for a ‘dash’ of lime in their lager (or whatever). 

But worst of all are garages which charge me 20p to inflate my tyre. And you though fresh air was free!

(This column was originally published in the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph on Saturday, 22 August, 1992)