Regulations Maketh the Man

Chair, ass; ass, chair. There. Now that the introductions are complete – for it's been so long that you've seen each other I thought I ought to reintroduce you – I thought I'd have a bit of a rant about regulations. This rant will take several days, I fear, so here's Part One.

We Brits are fond of regulations, it seems. Very, very fond. At least, a certain subsection of the population are. I fondly imagine that they wear pin-striped grey flannel clothing, sport pencil-thin moustaches (even the women) and have had clipboards surgically attached to their left forearms, for the sake of efficiency. I could be wrong about this but the alternative, that they might look perfectly normal and even be amongst us at this very minute is too awful to contemplate.

When the Romans ran their first ship up onto the beach at Richborough, two things happened. Firstly, a cat jumped off; and secondly, a native Celt with a little moustache wearing a grey striped kilt walked out of the forest and said 'Planning on leaving that thing there all day, are you? You'll need to speak to Bodvoc in the Permits Department.'

Actually this isn't true at all, and here's why. The Celts used no written language. The Druids (who practically ran the show) maintained that the moment you wrote something down you ceased to understand the essence of it. You could only really understand something by seeing, by doing, or by discussing it at great length and with copious amounts of alcohol. Subsequently writing anything down was forbidden, and if you were caught doing it the druids would be round in a hurry to show you at least three unexpected uses for a sickle on a dark night. For this reason the only written history we have about the Celts comes from the Romans, who were very keen to jump all over this baffling culture; not, you might say, the most reliable source. But looking back on the Celts' attitude towards written language, it seems obvious to me that the whole thing was devised as a very, and some might say terminally, effective defence against bureaucracy. And if their contention was that writing something down meant that you'd miss the point of it entirely, I can't help but look at our society and wonder if they might have been right.

Anyway, back to the cat. The reason I mention the cat is that my pharmacy employers tell me that May is the official Month of the Flea.

I mean, really. More later.