By Leslie Robins
I’m sick and tired of the bad press that the young people of today get in the Daily Mail and other despicable journals, and so I welcome the opportunity to set the record straight in the columns of that noble organ of free speech, The Lee Newsletter. Allow me to tell you the heart-warming story of my young friend Kevin, whose surname I omit so as to spare his blushes.
Nobody could say that Kevin was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. By the time he was 14 his mother had entered into four relationships, the latest with Reg, an unemployed heating engineer. Reg brought with him a tribe of assorted sons, all tattooed from head to foot and conversing in grunts interspersed with four-letter words. They were wary of Kevin at first because he pronounced his aitches, but his natural flair for leadership soon asserted itself and he became the acknowledged head of their gang, the Goths, based on a vandalised bus shelter in High Wycombe.
By the age of 16 Kevin had acquired three ASBOs, two in his own right and one bought for £20 from his friend Charlie Snodgrass, who assured him that this was well below the street value of these highly-prized emblems of rebellion. All this interfered somewhat with his education at the Nelson Mandela Comprehensive in Slough and he was actually expelled three times, but a dodgy lawyer friend of Reg’s invoked the Human Rights Act to get him re-instated. After that his attendance record improved and he was to be seen at his desk two or three times a week.
The standard of teaching slipped a bit after the Headmaster retired with a nervous breakdown, but Kevin made a real effort in his final year and got an A level at Grade D in Civic Studies. This mightn’t sound much, but under our enlightened educational system it was enough to get him a place at the University of Chipping Norton, which is perhaps less well-known than it ought to be, and he emerged three years later with a BSc in Ornamental Pond Management.
Having heard that graduates get the pick of the jobs market, Kevin was disappointed not to find a head-hunter at his door, but he bought a copy of Society Guardian and was gratified to find that his degree apparently qualified him to apply for the post of Assistant Director of Performance Strategy and Improvement, Director of Change and Innovation, or Human Resources Diversity Manager – all with various local authorities.
In no time at all he was settled in Burnley as a Youth Inclusion Project Co-ordinator and he soon lost his initial terrors of the job when he found that it consisted entirely of writing Mission Statements and Performance Reports in Management-speak, using various combinations of such expressions as key objectives, core values, cohesive social integration, ethnic inclusivity and strategic visions. He quickly got the hang of it and even invented several equally fatuous phrases of his own, as a result of which the Head of Human Resources earmarked him for the new post of Director of Development of Inter-personal Communication Skills, with Special Responsibility for Multi-Cultural Interface. A brilliant future for him seems assured.
So next time you hear someone disparaging the youth of today, just remember Kevin; and if you have any young friends you would like to see emulating his success, encourage them to learn Management-speak (also sometimes known as Gibberish) – the language in which the affairs of local authorities up and down the land are conducted. It’ll get them off to a flying start.