Butchers and referees

Everything is now viewed through a 'shortage' lens. Today's Times reports that "Britain is facing a shortage of butchers amid warnings that pigs in blankets, hams and party foods will be scarce this Christmas". And in the sports pages, "it has become a weekly scramble to find [referees] to take charge of matches, largely around London". "If he knows the rules and has a whistle, we'll take him" said someone from the Amateur Football Alliance. If only I didn't live 300 miles away ...

The solution is obvious: find some areas of surplus, too many people doing things that are at best useless at worst unnecessary. Start with the House of Lords. Here's your challenge for today, dear reader: locate your nearest member of that esteemed body, give him a lorry, her a cleaver and a dead cow, it a whistle [we're gender-inclusive here] and they can drive to the slaughterhouse, chop up the cow, deliver the meat to the butcher's shop, pick up and deliver some dirty diesel to the petrol station forecourts every Monday through Friday then, on Saturdays, referee Local United v Nearby Wanderers. Sundays, go and collect their attendance allowance at the House of Lords. There are 788 of them, for heaven's sake!  Make them useful.

No doubt my erudite readers will have suggestions for other surplus professions; let's hear them!

My guess is the government will be storing up all these apparent problems for a month and then, at the UN Climate Change Conference Cop26 in Glasgow, announcing "great strides by the United Kingdom towards achieving our carbon neutral goals by:

• reducing the number of lorries on our roads
• reducing the number of petrol and diesel cars on our roads
• reducing the numbers of cows and pigs eaten by our people
• nominating the 25th of December as "vegetarian Christmas Day"
• improving the health of our nation with a pilot scheme in which 788 extremely old people [of all genders] 'volunteered' to take part in a trial of the new 'Saturday running about and blowing a whistle' scheme"

What a dramatic announcement this would be! The whole world will be applauding ... until they realise that, if you don't eat the cows and pigs, they'll all be carrying on doing what they do, which is producing tons and tons of methane. "It has been estimated that methane gas from cows is 23x more damaging to our climate than the carbon dioxide produced by cars": check out cows v cars at ourfuture.energy.

Start stockpiling those pigs and blankets, people.