Mag-it in print

y domains are extensive and little normally disturbs the silence save the drip of brackish water or the touching screams of the small amphibians which my man, Kington, selects as my partners for the night. We are well supplied with green friends, so loneliness is not a problem and I am normally content to pass my time without human company. In the dry season, when the amphibians shrivel and nature is harsh, I used to fret bur now all I have to do is go to the Whitley Bridge garage, near Pontefract, where there is a round-the-clock maggot machine.

People who argue against technology will surely be converted by this marvelous example of man's ingenuity. No more hanging around outside some horrid back-street shop in the wind-whipped dawn, waiting for the proprietor to rise from his enseaméd bed and start dishing up the maggots, One simply leaps into the helicopter, checks one's trousers for the necessary loose change and heads for Whitley Bridge.

The journey is quick and the time passes easily in deciding which maggots to have. There are red ones, at £1.20 the tin; bronze ones, at £1.20 the tin; or fluorescent pink, at £1.20 the tin. For purists, there are white maggots, at £1.20 the tin. and for the indecisive, £1.20 will buy a tin of mixed maggots.

The maggot machine, modestly, says 'Fishing Bait" and 'Bag it with Mag-It'. But the Mag-It people underestimate their service, which can eliminate many of life's problems: night starvation, bedtime loneliness, designing women, croaking in the dark.

Hungry? Never mind trudging in the rain to the 7-Eleven for a delicious, hand-micro waved, EEC-approved Cornish-type pasty; simply ring the bell and in comes Kington, immaculately-dressed, his Japanese transistor (as always) pressed to his ear, with a tin of best bronze ready-opened on a Benares brassware tray. Lonely in the dark? A tin of fluorescent pinks emptied into a Marigold washing-up glove will solace even the longest nights, easily-visible even by the thin. weedy glow from the ancestral Wombles nite-lite. Women in print frocks hanging around and talking wistfully about babies? A tin of pallid. moist whites, like little executives, scattered around the legs of her chair, or around the legs of her self, or perhaps even placed in the toes of her Kurt Geiger pumps as she sleeps the sleep of the smug, will have her running from the premises yelping 'Ugh! Ugh! I have never seen anything so disgusting in my life!' And, of course, a tinful of plump reds, stored in a warm room and allowed to hatch, will keep at bay the croaking of rejected amphibia as they honk and blart for alimony, affection and food,

Bur, of course, you won't take advantage of the Mag-It, will you? Oh, there may be some feeble-minded characters who, having never even thought of maggots before, will, now that they are available, be creeping out of bed at three in the morning, pulling their trousers over their wincyette pyjamas, and pedalling off to Pontefract in the sleet. There, they will hang around importuning passers-by for change until they have enough for a fix of maggots: and, having them, will not know what to do with them. (This is the English way: disproportionate desire followed at once by incomprehension and neglect. That is why we like sheds so much. We need somewhere to keep all the things that we desperately wanted until we got them.)

he rest of you will take comfort from knowing that the Mag-It is there but will you go to Whitley Bridge? Will you shell out a measly £1.20? Will you give gaily-wrapped tins of maggots to your friends for Christmas? Will you buggery. What you will do is sit there, maggotless, vaguely aware of how maggots might alter your life but doing nothing about it, until one day some smirking cheat from the National Westminster Bank, making sure that people don't make the same mistakes his old man did, forecloses on the Mag-It man and the Mag-It of Whitley Bridge is taken away.

Then you will raise merry hell, of course. You will write to your MP. You will! sit on the lavatory nodding in petulant agreement at Gavin Stamp's diatribe in the Spectator, You will talk about it at dinner parries with Jenny, Wobbler, Lucinda and old Dogbreath who's riding out the recession rather well!.

How do I know? Because you’ve done it before. You believed all the lies the banks told you in the Eighties, and now you are moaning about the recession. You bought your electricity shares and your water shares and now you moan about the bills. You voted for Mrs. Thatcher and now you moan that you are having to remove your own gangrenous leg on the kitchen table. You paid through the snout on champagne and bresaola, and now you moan that the restaurants can’t survive now you’re skint. You complained about the old telephone boxes which you couldn't get into and then couldn't get out again, suffocating in the stench of urine, and then complained when Telecom replaced them. You fell for all that Peter Mayle bullshit and now moan that Provence is being spoiled.

The silence of my domains has been disturbed this week by people telephoning me to ask foolish questions about the 150^th anniversary of this organ, 'Will it survive?' they ask; 'What is wrong with it?' and 'Do you hate the editor?' Dolts. Of course I hate the editor, Every columnist hates his editor. It is part of the contract. As to the other questions, why do they immediately make me think of the likely fate of the wonderful Mag-It?