pumpkinstrokemarrow

A busy, in my present mood anyway, is a person who busies him or herself with the affairs of others, gratuitously, uninvited and often unwanted. Plural bisease, to rhyme with disease. So one has the political kind, generally elected and generally modestly paid, if paid at all. And one does need such people, whether or not one likes the ones that go in for it. Then there are the paid sort, public servants of various sorts, as I was myself until recently. 'Busy' is also often used in police dramas from Scotland to denote the uniformed ones with warrant cards. And then, at the bottom of the heap, you have the volunteer bisease. The people who have retired early, have pots of energy but are unable to devise occupations for themselves which do not involve doing good to others. Some of these people are truly doing good. Helping the old, the hungry, the halt and the lame. But some of them join committees.

One such committee has just commissioned the destruction of another slice of Epsom Common - which I happened to pass this morning - in the interests of the restoration of grazing or something. They are not even doing it themselves. They are using public money to hire contractors to burn up diesel to destroy carbon banks. How can they claim to be serving the eco-god by contributing so much to global warming?

And then there was the policeman who caught a driver blowing his nose while sitting in a stationary queue of traffic. The driver appealed the ticket but his appeal was denied. I wonder if there were aspects of the case that have not been reported to me? Like the driver needing to blow his nose because he was spluttering after a shot of vodka went down the wrong hatch.

I was told the other day of special policemen and women who patrol dog walking areas to make sure that dogs, bitches and their owners are complying with the doggy by-laws concerning waste products. The point of the inclusion of bitches is that it is quite hard to know what exactly a bitch is up to without going to inspect the spot afterwards. Dogs a quite different kettle of fish. Which makes unobtrusive enforcement a bit tricky. So here we have an opportunity for the surveillance industry. To develop a gadget which enables an enforcement officer to be sure what a bitch is doing at a hundred yards in poor light. Perhaps an odour version of infra-red detection. Then, the officer only needs to accost a dog owner who he can be confident is in breach. To the great improvement of public relations generally.

Reverting for a moment to the unpaid committees, I am reminded of an anecdote about young communists in those heady days when people thought that the Soviet Union was going to work. Lots of people went to build Siberia for all the extra rations. But young communists went for free, for god and for country. Or perhaps for motherland, party and comrade Stalin. But the people running Siberia found that the young communists were a bit of a pain. A tendency to have opinions, to disagree with the party line and generally to be a bit sanctimonious. So they thought it would be much better to just go for the paid people who shut up and got on with the job rather than talking about it.