The summer is a period of glorious laziness for Czechs. In some professions this starts earlier than in others. The teaching profession, for example, is one that provides for vast expanses of sloth. By this time of the year any teaching that is going on has descended to the level of the farcically tokenistic. Lectures have of course long finished in universities, whilst in regular schools students are either taking or have already taken their exams, and so now, since attendance is mandatory, both students and teachers are irritably killing time as parties to a do-nothing pact until school breaks up at the end of June, after which there follows a summer holiday period of two full months. In language schools, where attendance is voluntary, students are few and far between at this time of the year, despite having paid for their courses. Easy money for the teachers, if rather demoralising and potentially maddening if only one student turns up to class.
Although an extreme case, teachers are not the only lazy bastards in this country. For the whole of July and August the entire republic seems to grind to a halt, as families go abroad or off to their country cottage to fart around in the garden for a couple of months. Even those who go to work during these months spend most of their time there piddling about on the internet and drinking slivovice. This is a country where many people complain of being poor in comparison with their Western counterparts, but can nonetheless evidently afford not to work for enviable lengths of time. Hey ho, if you can’t beat em, join em.
Being self-employed these days I have no choice over this anyway. During the holiday season my orders for work simply dry up, and with the superb weather we’re having it seems to have started early this year. This has suddenly left me with a bit of extra time on my hands to trawl the net, during which I’ve recently come across this little gem – which MP would you rather
shag? There are sometimes quite hideous choices to be made, but with humour and a strong stomach on the part of the voter it can actually become quite addictive. It was the
Guardian that drew my attention to the website, which has predictably raised eyebrows in polite, politically correct circles. Its detractors can hardly complain that it’s sexist, since, given the male/female ratio amongst MPs, men are much more widely represented here than women. However, many protest that it’s
demeaning. Well I should fucking well hope so! Let’s just remember who these people are for a moment – MPs, the scum of the earth! Shouldn’t we find this opportunity to humiliate them rather empowering? After all, why should us little people be denied the pleasure of cracking off a spiteful wank over Caroline Flint, for example? Or perhaps, now that Labour are out of power, there might be added spice to giving one of those nasty, prim young Tories a good facial – Priti Patel and Penny Mordaunt are most certainly in the bank for a rainy day. These days I have more or less equal contempt for all three main political parties, so politics doesn’t really come into it that much. Labour, Tory, Lib Dem (although the best the latter can do seems to be 60 year old gilf Lynne Featherstone) are all surely thoroughly deserving of a good pasting, if you’ll pardon the expression. There’s also a personal advantage for me, living outside the UK, in that in the great majority of cases I’ve never heard these women speak, which would no doubt put me off my stroke a fair bit. There may be drawbacks – of course it’s juvenile and essentially ineffectual, furthermore it debases the wanker at least as much as the wankee. Still, even if it’s not a particularly mature or dignified way to get revenge, with the next election still 4 years away what else is left to us?
