Firstly, I’m not big on football. I don’t hate it, it’s just not an important thing in my life.

Like many kids, I got my lifelong indifference to football from my Dad. He didn’t buy me my first football the day after I could walk, and we spent many a happy hour not kicking a ball around the park. I fondly remember the first time he didn’t take me to see my first match, anxiously not clutching his hand as I didn’t look down in rapt wonder from the stands.

Also, I’m not that keen on beer. I don’t mind it, but I’d rather have a vodka and coke, thanks. Or a glass of wine. If I do have a beer it’s something not too hoppy and chilled to within an inch of it’s life. That’s just the way I roll.

I don’t play golf.

So really, I’m not a proper dad. Well, not by the standards of the Father’s Day Gift People. They’ve decided that all dads really want is a football-shaped beer dispenser. Or a beer-shaped football. Or golf-flavoured beer. Or whatever.

It’s all rather depressing. Unlike Jane (who has a rabid dislike of Mother’s Day – with good reasons) I kind of like the idea of Father’s Day. I don’t want to be waited on hand and foot, I’ve just never had a international day for me before and I want to milk it a bit.

But, if the Father’s Day Gift People have their way I’ll be getting a card with a joke about slippers on it, and a golfball-shaped opener for football-shaped beer bottles. Sigh.

I have it on good authority that Tom’s got me a little something though, and his taste is impeccable, so maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised!

There’s a covert propaganda campaign being fought. A campaign which, despite all its subtlety, has a very clear message: go to sleep, sleep is good, bedtime is the best time ever.

Now, like most parents of small children I guess, I value the times my son is asleep. It’s nice to have relaxed periods when your little bundle of joy is inert and not careering headlong from one deadly hazard to the next. So I’m all for gently persuading children that sleep is a good thing. I just think that maybe the publishers have gone way overboard in pushing the bedtime agenda.

Tom has several books explicitly about the bedtime ritual. Maisy’s Bedtime and How do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? are two examples, and they’re great books too. But then bedtime seems to crop up at the end of nearly all his other books too.

I think it’s partly because the books are designed to be read at bedtime, and the authors think perhaps if they put in lots of stuff about yawning and brushing teeth and kissing goodnight before drifting quietly into slumber, the child being read the story will take the hint and obediently nod off too.

But partly, I think, the reason why so many picture books end with the main character going to sleep is that the authors couldn’t be bothered to think of a proper ending.

They tend to go into so much detail, too. Just to fill space. Nitty gritty about brushing teeth, and picking favorite teddies, and being read bedtime stories. I mean what’s the point of reading a bedtime story about reading a bedtime story?

It’s something you never see in books for grown ups. Sure, characters go to sleep, but I can’t think of any novel where the last chapter has been all about the protagonist getting ready for bed.

I mean, it would really bugger up the end of Jane Eyre…

Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had. That very evening we returned to the manor house, and having carefully brushed our teeth, washed our faces, each chosen our favorite teddy bears and changed into our night attire, retired to our beds and fell blissfully asleep.

F I N I S

See? Rubbish. And yet we expect our children to put up with it.

Anyway, rant over. It’s time I went to bed.

We would not be one of these single-policy parties. Oh no, we would have several policies. Admittedly, they would all be supermarket-based. But when two pounds in every four in this country is spent in Tesco (I’ll check that statistic later), I think it’s fair to say that sort out the supermarkets, and you’ve pretty much sorted out everything else.

Our pledges:

1. Revalue the Squash Standard. Every supermarket these days provides so-called “double concentrate” squash. If they’re all doing it, surely then that means it’s now the standard strength squash? Under a SOS government, “double concentrate” squash would be renamed just “squash”. Most establishments would be banned from serving single-concentrate squash. Special exceptions would be made for village shops and specialist vintage food vendors, who would be allowed to sell regular-concentrate squash, as long as it was clearly labelled “Olde Style Weake Squashe”.
2. Make own-brand cereal packets informative or diverting. Those of us able to afford proper cereals are used to spending our precious minutes at the breakfast table reading the back of the cereal packet. Much like reading a shampoo bottle whilst having a poo, it gives the brain something to do whilst a vital but tedious part of the daily routine is fulfilled.
   However, we realise in the SOS Party that not all people are able to afford “luxury” cereals and have to settle for supermarket-branded alternatives. I myself decided to try my local supermarket’s Generic Malted Wheat Squares the other day, just to check how ghastly they were compared to proper cereals, and when I turned the box from it’s front-facing aspect I was shocked to be confronted by another front!
   Several more turns of the box confirmed my worst fears: the box had no informative rear panel. No blurb extolling the health benefits of the product under a warmly golden swathe of corn. No offer to receive some gewgaw by merely Sellotaping two pound coins to a faded form printed on the inside of the box. NOTHING!
   Under a SOS administration, all supermarket cereal boxes will be forced to provide diverting and/or informative information on their cereal box rears. Where they are unable to, one will be provided for them by a government ministry set up for this purpose.
3. Manned self-service tills. All self-service tills will come with a personal assistant, conveniently placed on a seat behind the till. They will aid the user of the self-service till in any way possible, ensuring that their items are quickly and efficiently tallied up, and that the chosen form of monetary transaction proceeds without delay.
   This will create thousands of jobs about the country and ensure that people will no longer be forced to wait valuable seconds for a mouth-breathing 16-year-old to wander over and press a button that says “yes this man is clearly well over the age limit for buying plastic cutlery”.

I think you’ll agree that with just these three changes, the average Briton’s day would be improved roughly 450%. I hope I can count on your vote in the election. Or if i’m too late, the one after that.

Yesterday I got a new bike. Not anything too fancy, but it’s quite a nice one and more than I’d have been able to afford if it wasn’t for the tax-free bike scheme being run by my employer.

It’s nice to have something big and new and “mine”. I’ve not bought anything major for myself since Tom was born, long gone are the days when I’d shell out for a new gadget on a whim and worry about the finances later.

One of the biggest pleasures of buying a New Thing of any variety, I think you’ll agree, is the bit where you sit down to have a proper read of the manual. Not before you’ve had a play with it, of course. You’d have to be made of stone (or possibly, a woman) to not have a good muck about with a new toy – and possibly break it a little bit because you don’t know what you’re doing – before sitting down with the manual to find out what you’re supposed to be doing.

But these days, I find, the manual is one area where manufacturers really let themselves down. They see the manual as a extra, not part of the product experience, as it should be.

Take, for example, the manual that came with my new bike. It was a one-size-fits-all manual written for the manufacturer’s entire range of bikes. Virtually everything from a child’s trike to one of those things that are designed for elegantly falling down mountains.

Half of the book, presumably on the advice of their lawyers, is dedicated to safety. It starts off with this chestnut:

Many of the Warnings and Cautions say “you may lose control and fall”. Because any fall can result in seriously injury or even death, we do not repeat the warning of possible injury or death.

Which is great because it’s bad enough wading through 10 pages of safety information without being constantly reminded of the ever-present spectre of Death.

Another section about riding safely, which I’ve edited for brevity’s sake, says:

Look ahead, be ready to avoid: vehicles slowing, turning, entering the road, coming up behind you, parked cars opening doors, pedestrians, children, pets, pot holes, sewer gratings, railroad tracks, expansion joints, road or sidewalk constructions…

… at this point the lawyers walked in on the manual’s author and pointed out that they’d had a brainstorming session and come up with another 5000 hazards, and the manual was going to need to be 300 pages thick, so he decided it would easier just to add…

The many other hazards and distractions which can occur on a bicycle ride.

After reading that lot I don’t want to leave the house, let alone get on a bike.

Then we get on to the meat of the manual, what can my bike actually do? This is where the one-size-fits-all mentality of the manufacturer kicks in.

Your new human-powered vehicle may have anything between one to three wheels. Depending on the make and model that you have purchased, it may be fitted with any of the following: gears, pedals, a saddle, a butler, anti-aircraft missiles, Spokey Dokeys.

Okay so I made that up, but it’s essential the style of the manual. Try and tell you everything about every bike, and end up telling you nothing about your bike. When they should be taking you by the hand and showing you, with maybe a bit of passion, all the neat little features and clever advances in bike tech that explain why it’s 10 times more expensive than your first Raleigh Grifter.

Because, call me a geek, but I want to know that kind of stuff.

So I can’t take the moral high-ground, and I won’t. If you’re copying stuff illegally, you’re probably just as nice a person as me. And I’m a very nice person.

But that doesn’t stop me getting pissed off about it.

It’s not the fact that people are downloading stuff without paying for it that pisses me off, it’s the excuses that people seem to think they have to give for doing it. For example:

“But, when you pay for music, most of the money goes to the wrong people anyway.”
So? If it that were true, you have to admit that some of the money goes to the creative people involved. Plus, all the other people involved in putting together that song, film or TV show. So, in some way, you’re stealing from those people, and no matter what your feelings are about the fat cat media moguls creaming off the profits, there a people involved who don’t deserve to be stolen from.

“But it’s not stealing.”
Okay, so you’re not reaching into their pockets and pulling out wads of cash with a hearty “yoink!”, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not a thief. Perhaps the problem here is that the word thief has the wrong connotations. It suggests that something has been physically transferred from the victim to the perpetrator. When you take a copy of something that you didn’t pay for, the original still exists, no harm no foul, right?

Wrong, it’s still stealing, it’s just by a more circuitous route. If you don’t like being called a thief, invent a different word for what you’re doing and we’ll add it to the dictionary. (Definition: see “Thief”).

“But everyone else does it!”
That one doesn’t work. Ask any MP.

“But you can’t get this TV show any other way!”
So? Just because you can’t get something by legal means doesn’t make it right to get by illegal means. In fact, I’ve not seen a single situation where a little sprinkling of two magic ingredients won’t resolve this kind of issue.

The magic ingredients are patience and money. For example, virtually every TV show comes out on DVD eventually, and you can wait and pay for it. If it doesn’t, well, see my next excuse.

“But I need it NOW!”
No, you don’t. You want it now. Nobody needs to see the latest TV show now. Chill out, go for a walk, read a bloody book, watch something else on the telly. Amazingly, you won’t die.

“But the laws are stupid and restrictive.”
That’s a maybe. I sometimes think it’s stupid that I have to drive at 40 miles an hour along the long straight road to my house, because that’s the speed limit, even at 2 in the morning. That’s because laws are blunt instruments, designed to be morally right in the majority of situations. In this case, it’s morally right to expect payment for something you’ve created. The laws that defend that right may be “stupid” in places, but if you’re worried about that, fight to change the law.

For info, downloading stuff illegally isn’t fighting to change laws, it’s just ignoring them.

There are probably a lot more excuses that I haven’t thought of, but they all seem to boil down to the same basic statement: “I don’t want to pay (or wait) for the content I’m consuming, and people have made it easy for me to get it for nothing, so I will.”

That’s not an excuse, it’s a reason. If you use it as your reason, rather than pretending that somehow you’re fighting the good fight against restrictive copyright laws and evil media corporations, then I’ll respect you for not fooling yourself or trying to fool me. But don’t pretend that it’s a good reason. It’s just a reason.