A Tale of Two Towns
Published: 23 August 2020 by Mick Hart
Once upon a time there were two towns, one called Decadence and the other Tradland. Although the children who lived in each were much the same as children everywhere, the two towns, and the way they were run, were altogether different.
The children who lived in Decadence were told by their prefects that they lived in a blessed land, a land of plenty, full of endless supplies of sweets, chocolates and ice cream and to get this endless supply they need do nothing. In Decadence, there was precious little in the way of laws, except for those that related to credit and borrowing, and all mention of good behaviour or, heaven forbid, morality had been swept under the globalist carpet donkeys’ minds ago.
The children of Decadence had ‘rights’ and all they needed to do to ensure these rights, which in turn ensured an endless supply of sweets, chocolates and ice creams ~ or so they were led to believe ~ was to go the betting office once every five years and put a cross on one of the betting slips. To make it easy for the children, who to be honest did not understand much about high-stakes gambling, the National Democracy Race had always been a two-horse fix. There were no winners only losers; no matter who you placed your bet on, you always got more of the same. Most of what you got was promises, but as the children of Decadence had been taught from primary school to the time that they left university, usually with a triple first in banner carrying, what was the point of promises? They were only there to be broken.
Nevertheless, Decadence was sold to the children who lived in it and to the rest of the world as such a bountiful place that people flocked there from every forsaken corner of the world. It did not matter that thrown together in this way these poor unfortunates despised one another with a vengeance, squabbled, fought, and grappled for power, as the prefects just kept on telling them that Decadence was Utopia and everybody in it one big happy family. And the more they repeated this, the more the children who lived there, who let me say dear reader did not know any better, wanted to, or were made to, believe that what they were told was the truth .
A Fairy Tale for the End of Summer 2020
Meanwhile, whilst the children were getting fat, indolent and lazy on too many sweets, ice creams and chocolates, the prefects, who had carefully schooled them in the art of looking the other way, were busy plundering the world of its wealth and resources. From the children’s point of view, this good life was a life without end. They really did believe that ice creams, sweets and chocolates grew on Rights trees, firstly because the prefects told them so and secondly because those same kind prefects were always willing to grant them credit, as long as they paid the interest, of course.
A few miles away, down the road from Decadence, there was another town, a very large town indeed. In this town the children were not much different from the children in Decadence. They, too, liked ice cream, sweets and chocolate, but they had been taught that in order to have these luxuries they had to work for it. In Tradland, rights were not enough to get ice cream, also to be considered was respect, social responsibility and a very old-fashioned and out-dated idea by Decadence’s standards, morality.
The prefects in Tradland were not as bad as they were painted by those in Decadence, who, as one old sage from Decadence remarked, “Decadence is ‘frit’ of sovereign values, and therefore ‘frit’ of Tradland itself” (The parish magazine promptly labelled him as the village idiot. He was excommunicated by the high priest of the Internet, Facebook, and never heard of again.). But in Tradland sponsored-egotism, waywardness and the continual free-for-all mentality that was worn like a badge of honour in Decadence was not encouraged. Neither did the prefects of Tradland support a World and Its Wife attitude with regard to who came to their town and who lived there. In short, they wanted their town to be lawful and safe, to be proud of its history and conserve its way of life.
Whilst Tradland did not care too hoots how Decadence was run, the prefects in Decadence had been brought up on the nasty belief that you could never have enough. Gangs in Decadence had sprung up and these gangs, such as Hope for More Ice Cream and Hate for Traditional Values, were bent ~ as were many of their followers ~ on whipping up trouble in their own town, and the prefects, whilst never admitting it, supported them in this quest and used words like free toffee apples and equal candy floss opportunities as a pretext for bullying other towns to adopt their ice-cream-on-credit mentality.
As Tradland had more bows and arrows than Decadence, the only way Decadence could get the upper hand was to attempt to change it from within. To help them to do this they enlisted the assistance of the men with bent noses who owned and ran the parish magazine. Using a language which a lot of the children understood, Sheep, they produced endless articles calling the prefects of Tradland all sorts of nasty names and promoted the lawlessness and bad behaviour that epitomised Decadence as a natural product of freedom whilst disparaging the rule of law and order and conservative values in Tradland as a sorry old state of affairs ~ a bit like a shop where you couldn’t steal sweets.
One day, quite unexpected, a stranger climbed over Bills Gate and ended up in both towns, and more besides, at once. In Decadence, where there were many strangers, and no one was allowed to question him on pain of having their ice cream tubs removed, he passed among the children like a peculiar shepherd. Dressed from head to toe in black, and carrying a strange kind of crook, he wove back and forth among his flock, who were far too boisterous and self-obsessed to even know how close he was to them ~ certainly less than a metre (cough! cough!).
In Tradland, the stranger was spotted at once, but although Decadence’s parish magazine, Gardnonsense, reported that Tradland’s evil prefects had immediately deprived him of his lollipop, he had in fact been placed in quarantine, as the elder prefects of Tredland, being wise men, suspected who he was. And do you know who he was children? He was the man from Pestilence!
Some children later chanted the ancient rhyme, “Never on a Saturday, Never any day, Here comes the bogeyman send Sorryarse away”, the same rhyme was sung by a minority of rebellious children in Decadence, but they were soon shut up by the prefects and parish magazine, which threatened them with inciting hatred against harlequin ice cream, which was a state-ordained brand rolled out and force fed from early-years school, through doctored GCSE grade to a university first in PCism.
In spite of the best efforts in Tradland and none in Decadence, the contagion spread ~ or, at least, appeared to spread! Some of the more selfish children thought that it was simply an excuse to stop them going to the shops to glut on ice cream, whilst still others cried that the Pills & Potions Gang were masterminding a protection racket called Vaccine.
Whatever anyone believed or did not believe, Decadence declared a race: who could develop the vaccine quickest. It was all a matter of more sweets, chocolates and ice cream, and their reputation as Freeloadersville (as some wags called Decadence) depended on it.
About the same time as all this was taking place, a pantomime came to town. It was a spiffing wheeze in which the main jape was to accuse people of things that were done centuries ago and then pull their statues down. The prefects, anti-farcists, and other street gangs loved it. Decadence’s police force, which had long ago had its force forcibly removed, dutifully ignored it and the prefects of the town clapped furiously from the front rows as they did absolutely everything in their power to do absolutely nothing about it. It was such high jinks, this pantomime, that it was not long before the game had spilled out onto the streets. Children were running amok. Choc ices became an overnight best seller and statues of the great and good were coming down faster than you could sing “Roll me over, more from Dover, Roll me over, take them down and my country away”. Talk about knees up Mother Brown! It was all jelly, ice cream, sticky buns, sweets, chocolate and …. yes, children, you’ve got it ~ it made one sick to the stomach.
Just when tears before bedroom looked imminent, it was announced in Tradland that a vaccine had been found. What a calamity! Unless something was done about it quickly all bets would be off! As luck would have it, luck for Decadence that is, at about this time a small village that lay between Decadence and Tradland, Agoodexcuse, developed a serious problem. The man who ruled the village was looked upon by some not as a guiding prefect but a stern and strict headmaster. A good many of those he ruled, began to call for change. Some believed that this call for change had been aided and supported by the ice cream salesmen from Decadence, but Decadence’s parish magazine painted an entirely different story, with tales of ice-cream deprivation and sweets-withholding practices contrary to the natural laws of Hedonism (which was a large and frivolous amusement arcade owned and operated by the Obama Fence-Sitting Company ~ those who spoke Sheep adored it!).
The parish magazine was a gay parade of encouragement, urging the prefects of Decadence and towns of a similar ilk to intervene, ‘More sweets! More Ice cream! More sticky buns!’ it cried, whilst at the same time, terrified of true conservatism, throwing out more than a hint here and there that the prefects of Tradland were up to no good.
And then, just at this point of time ~ when pestilence and conspiracy theories were at their most contagious, when the children were out of control, the police and prefects powerless, the vaccine race lost, the ice creams melting, the sweets getting sticky and a man who would not stop taking about boats coming in ~ an incident occurred that enabled the prefects of Decadence to resort to the old tried and tested distraction routine, ‘Look out … he’s behind you!’ A staple of all good pantomimes!!
Someone, a free-ice-cream advocate, who did not like the prefects of Tredland, had suffered an accident, but the prefects of Decadence, who never missed an opportunity to put Tredland down, aided and abetted by the parish magazine, Gardnonsense, was bellowing that someone in Tredland had tripped him up!
The Twice-Daily Blackmail, a parish magazine that appealed to older children who loved parrots, had a parrot field day and, before you knew who you were or who you were standing next to, although you knew you had been here a lot longer than them, although they wanted you to believe that you were a stranger in your own town and they were the best thing since boats and Dover, the preface had been written ~ Tradlandaphobia had come round again.
Now, should Tradland attempt to help in any way the village of Agoodexcuse to heal its wounds, Decadence will roar that anyone who is naughty enough to trip someone up will not think twice about regulating ice cream in a small and vulnerable village! And, this dear, children is their despicable plan. They have merely written a preface to the narrative that they have already written.
But take heart! Like all good fairy tales this story has a moral subtext. See that man over there, the one in the long dark robes lurking by the school gates. See the bag of sweeties in his swarthy hand. If he offers you one resist it, resist it at all costs, because it comes with a hidden price, the most expensive price you will ever pay ~ culture. Because come the day when the ice cream melts, and it will, all that he will leave you with is the wafers of your memory.
There is more to life than ice creams, sweets and chocolates, and it is not what you cannot take with you that matters (WYCTWY Matters), it is what you leave behind, such as heritage, history, ancestral home, for future generations.
If Decadence was writing this story, even though tradition means nothing to it anymore, it would fall back on the traditional fairy tale ending, and say of itself and its peculiar admixture “And they all lived happily ever after!”
Aaahh, If dreams were horses beggars would ride …
Goodnight children, everywhere.
Other Stories for Bedtime
Coronavirus & the Fear of Conservatism
The Covid-19 Vaccine Race
What Really Matters
Is the UK in Multicultural Meltdown?
Featured photo credit ~ https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/pictures/260000/velka/halloween-haunted-ruins.jpg)
