Let's look on the bright side of council cutbacks. After all, optimism is free, and we need to start deploying it
Honestly, sometimes our unwillingness as a nation to see the glass as half full instead of half empty really disappoints me. Take the news that the BBC is under fire for allowing dogs to foul a street in Lancashire as part of a documentary illustrating the potential effects of cutting council budgets and services. An outrageous piece of scaremongering by the corporation, says one Tory MP, while others bleat about a waste of the licence fee. Meanwhile, the alternative lesson proffered by the stunt passes by unnoticed.
In the late 70s and early 80s, a trip to the newsagent's with Dad used to offer my sister and me the chance to play Dog Muck Dodgers. Our record was 72 turds within the 350-yard journey – though we did note in the logbook that this was after a cold and rainless spell that had given an unusual degree of longevity to the average deposit – and our most disappointing results were always in autumn, when leaves covered so many fine offerings. It was forbidden to kick them – it's called Dog Muck Dodgers, not Dog Muck Get It All Over Your Shoes So That You Traipse It Through the House When You Come Home. By the time we went to secondary school, we were Catford's answer to Sioux braves and could track an individual's spoor for miles. What you lose in municipal services, it is often forgotten, you can gain in acquisition of unexpected life skills.
Optimism is free, folks, and we need to start deploying it.
You can supplement your children's increasingly bleak state educational diet by taking them round the cemetery. This is where Dad taught us to read, add and subtract. "Look, there's your name! L-U-C-Y. 1845 to 1853. So how old was she when she died of P-L-E-U-R-I-S-Y? Eight, yes – the same age as you! Why are you crying?"
Of course, you will probably have to clear grass and bindweed from the neglected headstones in the austerity age, but again, it'll be free exercise now that the leisure centre has been turned into a workhouse, and the children will master basic labouring techniques that will serve them well in the increasingly self-sufficient days to come. The sooner they learn which lichens they're scraping off are toxic and which can be used as the basis of a nourishing soup, the better.
Remember that anything at all can be made fun if you are convincingly enthusiastic and your children stupid enough. My mother used to take us to work with her in the school holidays, to the family planning clinics of south-east London, where we became familiar with the practical shortcomings of the 1960s passion for utopian architecture ("Look how much junkie piss the average concrete buttress will absorb, Mummy! And how well it hides those men with overwhelming social problems and large knives!"). There we'd sit, passing many a happy hour stuffing packets of Microgynon and accompanying instructional leaflets into paper sheaths (if you'll pardon the pun), then repacking them into boxes for later distribution to the sexually active locals ("Leave them behind the nearest buttress on your way out"). After initial training, the averagely dexterous seven-year-old can manage 60 an hour. Not only does she not need childcare herself, but by the end of the summer holiday she can effectively have reduced next year's creche budget by 80% (even the most able will accidentally omit some of the leaflets).
Back home, we continued to make our own entertainment. Mum would paint her nails with Stop'n Grow, pinch our noses and try to force her foul-flavoured fingers into our mouths. How we laughed! I can still taste it now. A lingering bitterness. Memories are made of this, particularly if social services have been cut to the bone.
Anyway, just a few tips to get you started. Let us face the faeces-filled future together! And remember – what you're smelling is not shit, but a new and shining morn.