I was wrong, and not in a good way. Last week I estimated that at the then current rate of increase of covid cases, Australia was going to reach 1 million cases by Tuesday.

Well, it’s Monday and we are already at a million.

Happily, there is no need for any further lockdowns. Everyone is now so used to this mess that they are just staying home anyway to try and avoid catching it. When at Highpoint West this morning, the shopping centre was practically deserted, as was my bus.

In a land where sport is sacred

Where the labourer is God

You must pander to the people

Make a hero of a clod

– Henry Lawson

I like to quote Sir Frank Lowy’s justification for his sponsoring of Australian soccer rather than just giving money to charity. He once dismissed his critics with the succinct comment that ‘Sport brings joy’ or something along those lines.

Much as I am not a very sporty type, I love my AFL team (Western Bulldogs, for those new to my blog) and I have been known to occasionally watch a rugby game on the TV or at the pub, or to stare at the Test Cricket on the TV whilst downing a few cans of cold beer on a warm day.

I am however, as I observed in great detail during the Olympics last year, very skeptical about federal government funding for sports in Australia. This is for several reasons.

One is that sport is mostly the preserve of civil society, and that when government funds something, they control it – he who pays the piper calls the tunes.

Another is that if sport is going to get government funding, then the construction of giant stadia is more the preserve of state governments (in partnership with the relevant sporting leagues and organisations), whilst community playing fields and sporting facilities really are the business of local government.

A more concerning one perhaps is that federal government funding for sport does push a nationalistic agenda, and often one where the main goal is winning at all costs rather than good sportsmanship. Other less benevolent regimes than our own, such as the Eastern Bloc, the PRC, and of course Germany in 1936, have frequently pursued sporting success as a propaganda tool.

The whole Djokovic debacle unfolding this past few days has had me wondering about the behaviour of one of our publicly funded sporting bodies, Tennis Australia.

From what I have been able to ascertain from the mainstream media, Tennis Australia made some discreet general enquiries in November about vaccination requirements for persons wishing to enter Australia. They then selectively interpreted the replies they received from the health minister and a senior official, and extrapolated a conclusion diametrically opposite to the established position, and then unilaterally announced to the world in general that Djokovic had a vaccine or travel exemption of some sort and was going to come to The Australian Open.

The sheer arrogance of the attitude of Tennis Australia is breathtaking in its scale. Australia, being a sporting nation, values its sporting heroes and major sporting events highly. The Australian Open is probably our premier ongoing international sporting tournament (sorry petrol heads – the Grand Prix is not even close).

Obviously Tennis Australia believes that it is too big to fail, and that a few rules that the rest of us mere mortals have to abide by can be disregarded or brushed aside.

It turns out that this is not the case, even through Djokovic’s father is currently comparing Djokovic to Jesus (does this make Djokovic pere God?).

The contempt that Tennis Australia has shown for the rules that the rest of us are forced to live by shows that it and it’s overpaid sporting administrators clearly indicates that they think that they are better than the Australian public.

Which does beg the urgent question: Why are Australian taxpayers funding Tennis Australia to the tune of about $5 million per year?

I want my twenty cents back!

The Xi variant, more commonly known as Omicron (there being no such adverb as ‘cowardlyLY’ in the English language yet to describe the relevant verb in this context, ‘cowardly’ itself being an adjective, and I have already sought to make ‘Roxy’ my contribution to the English language this month) seems to be going forward at a rapid pace.

As I observed yesterday, it looks like reaching a million cases by next Tuesday and will probably infect everyone in Australia by the end of February. For the first time during this pandemic, people that I know personally are infected with this plague, both colleagues and family friends.

What does this mean for us going forward in the coming weeks?

Aside from restrictions starting to get reimposed in Victoria and NSW (and hopefully those stay minor), there are a few subtle and unwelcome changes to the society we had before the pandemic started.

Let us count the ways.

First, people seem a lot more apprehensive than they did even as recently as eight months ago. The recent infection numbers are definitely causing the numbers of people frequenting shopping centres and other public places to visibly drop, even though the main restriction currently in place to deter people is the constant QR code scanning (something which does turn me off from going into a shop to browse).

Second, interest in travelling interstate or overseas has dropped. Nor are people that keen on intrastate travel, given the current pandemic infection rates. After all the border closures, lockdowns and ‘rings of steel’, there is no trust that anyone will be able to take a holiday away from home and be able to either reach their destination safely or return according to plan.

Third, shortages, shortages, shortages. This time, infections and isolations amongst logistics staff (ie truck drivers) mean that goods are not getting delivered. On top of this, infections and isolations amongst supermarket staff mean that there is no one there to stock the shelves or to serve you at the check out. And staff shortages mean that restaurants and bars and cafes, even if they want to reopen, are going to find it hard. There were shortages of bread and meat in the supermarket this morning. I did not bother looking for toilet paper because I do not need to stock up – I have a 2 year supply.

For the first time, the number of people who are infected in Australia has reached significant numbers, despite the number of people fully vaccinated. This is going to bite, and we know too little about the Xi variant so far to trust that it is going to be mild.

Large numbers of people are going to isolate and stay away from their jobs and out of society in the coming weeks, and running the essential parts of the economy like grocery retail and health services is going to be very challenging without people at their places of business.

The COVID variant commonly known as Omicron was originally meant to be called the Xi variant, as that was the letter of the Greek alphabet next in line to be used to name it. However, the World Health Organisation showed its usual backbone and named it Omicron so as not to offend the communist dictator Xi Jinping, whose regime has been most instrumental in the inadvertent (?) spread of this plague.

Yesterday, total covid numbers in Australia rose by just under 65000 to about 612,000 cases since the plague began 2 years ago. That is a one day increase of 11%. At this rate, we will hit 1 million cases by next Tuesday and everyone in Australia could catch the plague by the end of February.

Globally, yesterday there were 2.3 million new cases – the most daily cases reported ever – during one of the earlier waves the daily case numbers approached 900,000 at their peak.

Maybe the Xi variant is just nuisance value, although just like it’s namesake, I am not prepared to take the risk on that.

And today we have the debacle of tennis superstar and famous anti-vaxxer Djokovic being refused entry to Australia, although several days ago Tennis Australia and the Victorian government had announced that he was going to be allowed to come and play in The Australian Open. I am not so interested in the details as to how and why he was originally told he could come (it all seems quite Byzantine to me), only to be stopped at the airport on arrival, as to what the hell was going through the minds of the people who announced his exemption in the first place?

It strikes me as something particularly tone deaf. Here, we have been going through two years of lockdowns and draconian suppression of rights such as those of expression and protest. People have been significantly economically disadvantaged by extended closures of their businesses. Some 2000 Australians have died, and many others seriously ill. Vaccinations, whilst not technically mandatory, are required to enter most shops, and indeed to work in most occupations. Queues for Covid tests take many hours, and now people have taken to queuing outside pharmacies to buy the home tests this week. We have a new wave of shortages of groceries due to the latest wave causing many supermarket and logistics staff to have to isolate. We have to wear masks and incessantly scan QR codes thanks to this plague.

And Tennis Australia thinks someone who is rich and famous can just waltz in despite not being vaccinated?

It does make me suspect, as many people already believe, that in Australia, we have one rule for the rich, and one rule for everyone else.

In the meantime, we have this Xi variant ripping its way through the population. Whilst I write, just the totals announced for Victoria, NSW and QLD are over 60,000 this morning. I really think we will get to a million cases by Tuesday. The damage that this plague is doing to small businesses, grassroots sporting and community groups, and civil society generally is going to take years to repair. Disruption to the The Australian Open, whilst this tournament is a source of prestige to Australians generally and to Melbourne, is minor collateral damage – although Tennis Australia appears to be headed by people who have the ear of politicians, people who are tone deaf.

One of my minor problems (which I do not think even counts as a first world problem) is that I do not own enough beer branded clothing (except for baseball caps – I have a lot of those).

Perhaps I could fix it by visiting the Victoria Market on a Sunday. They sell all kinds of bogan clothing items there on Sundays.

Anywho, I was in Cotton On at Highpoint West this morning, looking to buy some cargo shorts, and noticed that amongst the various t-shirts featuring Mickey Mouse and various prestigious US Universities, there were two t-shirt designs with Fosters Lager as the main theme.

I took a closer look at the price tag, and decided that $34.99 is a bit too dear for me to become a walking advertisement for a hard to find beer. The flip side of the price tag did catch my attention however – it had something like 18+ on it.

I am not about to encourage underage drinking, and I will have some very minor reservations about the appropriateness of teenagers wearing beer logo t-shirts (although I think it is very cute when parents bring their toddlers into a pub), but I think it is silly to expressly prohibit the sale of t-shirts with beer logos on them to minors.

After all, you can’t get drunk from wearing a beer logo t-shirt. Or can you?

This year, Good Friday does not happen til 15 April. However, given that the holiday calendar is geared around maximising retail sale volumes, Hot Cross Buns and other Easter related matters appeared in my local supermarket even before the New Year.

I am not sure whether they appeared on Boxing Day, but believe me, by New Year’s Eve, the Hot Cross Buns were already in store.

This does not really surprise me. Christmas decorations and carols started appearing in the local shopping mall (in my case, Highpoint West) just after Halloween, not too long into my 13 week staycation.

You might think, from the prolonged emphasis on Christian festivals, that we live in a society of heightened religious fervour.

The opposite however is the truth, and probably for the simple reason that we have mostly forgotten the significant of our religion, and whatever was our connection to it, but have retained the desire to celebrate it.

The cornucopia of plenty that we enjoy in our modern post-industrial civilisation means that we have, for the most part, the wealth and the leisure to celebrate for just about any occasion, and to prolong those celebrations. [I expect sociologist Max Weber, who wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, would have had much to say about our capacity and need to celebrate for prolonged periods, but as he has been dead for about a hundred years, I am just name dropping him to show how well read I am.]

After all, Santa Claus is some sort of modern distortion, developed mostly by Coca Cola’s marketing department a century or more ago, of Germanic medieval Christmas traditions. South Park are totally right when they ridicule modern Christmas traditions by having Jesus and Santa either confront or help each other.

And now we have the ultimate in marketing travesties around Easter. That is, the creation of Hot Cross Buns with Vegemite in them. Which were in the supermarkets immediately after Christmas.

For those who might read my blog and are not Australian, Vegemite is a very typical Australian savoury spread people put on their toast. It is made from a yeast extract, normally left over from beer production (we Australians do love our beer, so there is plenty of left over yeast byproducts which can be recycled into Vegemite). It is very much an acquired taste.

When you look at how insanely the meaning of Easter has been twisted in the name of commercialism, this is not surprising. What does an Easter Bunny and all that chocolate have to do with the voluntary death (in a literally excruciating manner) and subsequent resurrection of our Saviour? And what does entitlement does a Bilby (an endangered Australian marsupial) have to replace the Easter Bunny here in such observances? And now we have Vegemite on Hot Cross Buns?!?

Anyway, my brother says that they taste great, so I might try one tomorrow when I head over to sponge breakfast at my mother’s home.

I have never been into all that contemporary CE (Current Era) and BCE (Before Current Era). For me, counting the years with the Latin preface Anno Domini (In The Year Of Our Lord) suffices as much now as it did 20 or 200 or 1500 years ago, and does so for most people, except for woke academics. Mind you, the monk who decided to count the years from the birth of Christ (and got canonised for his efforts) did get the actual year of Christ’s birth wrong – He did first come to us about 7 or 8 years earlier than the year 1 (there is no year zero).

If that does not work for you, then as an alternative perhaps we should count the years from the actual creation of the world, which would make right now the year 6030 or so – given that the somewhat pedantic Bishop Usher calculated from his reading of the Bible that the world was created sometime in October of 4008 BC….

But this is all just me being a tad provocative as a segue into my reflections on New Year’s Day, AD 2022. I am not a creationist, and my practice of Roman Catholicism rarely goes much further than ticking that box on the religion question on the Census every 5 years.

Today was a stinking hot day – the third in a row, although thankfully it appears that a mild cool change arrived early and has caused the temperature to drop from 39 degrees Celsius to 29 degrees, ending a three day streak of days in the high 30s.

Despite being invited to two New Year Eve parties, I stayed home due to the heat, and was visited by a friend who brought a couple of bottles of chilled sparkling wine with her. That passed the time until a little while after dusk.

Another reason not to go out on New Year Eve is to do with the limited availability of transport home after midnight. Taxis and gig economy rides like Uber were in short supply last night, and the surge prices that Uber allows in high demand situations, whilst a practical demonstration of free market economics, make taking an Uber rather expensive, even for those of us who enjoy a relatively materially affluent bourgeois lifestyle.

The likelihood of big earnings in the wee hours of New Year’s Day for drivers, combined with the heat wave keeping many people indoors, has adversely affected the food delivery services that I am prone to use during heat waves. Drivers became scarce yesterday afternoon, because they presumably needed to rest up for their busiest and most profitable night of the year, and hence in my local area it was impossible to order through any of the three options I keep on my phone (ie Menulog, Deliveroo, and Uber Eats). Nor, with the heat wave, was I going to trek 20 minutes to the nearest Thai restaurant (the one closest to my home closed for good in early December).

Today, my cravings for comfort food continue to be unfulfilled – the driver shortage plus the holiday closures of a lot of restaurants means that there are few options on the delivery apps aside from Macca’s (which is definitely not worth getting delivered) or Domino’s (and even there, the two closest Domino’s stores are not showing up as available for delivery).

So what does AD 2022 hold for us?

I for one am really sick of the Covid Plague – of the self-serving rhetoric of various of our technocratic political leaders, masks, QR codes, and electronic vaccine certificates. Hopefully Omicron proves to be a very mild variant and gives the unvaccinated some ongoing immunity from the plague, whilst a booster shot might finally put the risk away for the rest of us.

A state election is due in November, and I do not see a change of government happening, despite the groundswell of danger by some people in the community against our ersatz Maoist Premier Chairman Dan. There is an utter lack of a credible opposition in Victoria at the moment, as evidenced by the second coming of Matthew Guy as opposition leader, a chap whose tenure as Planning Minister in the last coalition state government was underpinned by at least two highly questionable decisions on zoning. His previous tenure as opposition leader subsequent to that resulted in a heavy defeat, but not before the infamous ‘Lobsters with Mobsters’ lunch which reflected little credit on his judgement.

A federal election is due well before then, although I believe that technically, the House of Reps does not need to face election before October. Most recent federal elections have been held at odd times of year, based on the capricious quirks of the incumbent PM (eg Gillard going in August 2010 in order to seek a mandate immediately after she had pushed Rudd out, Turnbull doing something rather similar in July 2016, and ScoMo going in May 2019 because he thought that the timing was right).

Elections are usually held in either early to mid Autumn or in late Spring. Holding elections in the dead of Winter like Gillard chose just reflects contempt for the party faithful who will have to brave the elements. Summer, aside from the first half of December, is out because of the holiday season and then the reality that it is uncomfortable to campaign in the heat. Which leaves as realistic options late March, April, and most of Spring (except for when we have the AFL and NRL grand finals at the end of September and start of October, and the very start of November, when the Spring Racing Carnival distracts people).

My gut feeling is that an election will be called for April 2 or 9, although as I do not advise ScoMo (only Jesus and the leaders of Hillsong do that), it is beyond my ken to predict.

I think that there will be a change of government federally. In both 1993 and 2004, voters were tired of the federal government, but were scared off by the opposition. They changed their minds resoundingly at the following election.

Whilst the coalition in this term has performed competently, compared to the infighting of their first two terms, they have quite a few things going against them. One is the perception, through the performance and behaviour of various front benchers, that they are arguably amongst the dodgiest governments in Australian history. Another is that the opposition does not have a dislikable fake as its leader this time – they have Albo, who is as loveable as Humphrey B. Bear. And a third is that it is very rare for governments to win fourth terms (I can only think of three instances – the Menzies era run of 8 wins in a row, Hawke-Keating with 5, and Howard with 4).

Of more interest is what happens internationally. Communist China remains a menace to the Indo-Pacific region, although whether it is, as Mao might have said, a paper tiger remains to be seen. There are a lot of demographic and other issues ticking away within the PRC which could see its sudden decline. Putin’s Russia is probably more of a threat to its own citizens than to the Free World, but Putin is belligerent and showing signs of aggressive expansionism not seen since Leonid Brezhnev got drunk at Christmas and ordered the tanks into Afghanistan in 1979.

And the thing we worry about most is money, because we all need to eat and want to have reasonably comfortable lives. This is the time of year where stock brokers and economists make their predictions and give their tips for the coming year.

I will tell you this about those predictions. They will all be wrong. All the stock tipping newsletters I read are hit and miss – for every stock they suggest which suddenly takes off, there are four or five which either go nowhere or totally tank.

[As a personal example, one stock broker made a New Year’s tip in one of the newspapers about a decade ago about a gold explorer called Robust Resources. I punted (and punt is the accurate term) $1000 on it. The company no longer exists, and I think I got out $200 of what I had punted whilst the share price spiralled into terminal decline.]

The vogue for money printing through such pundits as the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory leads me to suspect that the share market is going to continue, despite regular blips, to move upwards.

But there are a lot of headwinds which could affect this. I don’t expect War, but there are other possibilities. The PRC is constantly providing false figures on GDP growth and other economic measures, as well as putting both its own companies and others who invest in China at a high degree of sovereign risk. At some point, whether it is a whale like Evergrande or conflagration across the entire Chinese financial system, there is going to be some sort of serious financial crisis in China.

And of course, we have Bitcoin and all those other cryptocurrencies. These have no intrinsic value and just rely on the great fool theory, a bit like a pyramid scheme or a bubble. People believe in Bitcoin for as long as they will believe in magic beans. When they stop believing that the beans are magic, Bitcoin will collapse.

So, what should you do? I have no answers. Do what you think is most comfortable for you. I think I will be constantly stocking up on toilet paper and canned foods for the zombie apocalypse. I might buy some gold or silver bullion. These are not strategies I am following to get rich – just to ensure that if things end up a lot less optimistically than what Modern Monetary Theorists predict, then I will not be too uncomfortable.

Have a happy new year, readers, and try not to abandon your New Year’s resolutions until next week.

The philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche in his writings frequently deplored the materially affluent and relatively safe bourgeois lives that most people of his era lived.  He found such lives mundane and unheroic.  He yearned for the coming of a Superman, an Ubermensch, who would, through his example, topple the existing moral order and usher in a new age of heroism and daring.

Sometimes, even though it is 30 years since I first read Nietzsche and I have long since settled into suburban mundacity with all its petty comforts, I still wonder whether there should be more to life than our trivial everyday existences.

There is little that is more archetypical of that mundane bourgeois existence than the currently vogue term ‘Karen’.

A ‘Karen’ is a woman from a relatively privileged middle class background who exhibits a strong sense of self-entitlement, particularly in relation to airing grievances and demands to people who are less empowered than she.  It is probably the case that the Karen does not consciously realise that she lives a life devoid of significant meaning and mostly disempowered, but instinctively lashes out at those around her to try and assert some semblance of power and meaning over her otherwise trivial existence.  In this, I suspect that she is trying to express herself as some sort of Uberfrau (if you pardon my coining of peculiar German concepts).

No one can better illustrate what an Uberfrau is like than the high profile and cliché driven marketing maven Roxy Jacenko.  The trivial headlines and incessant media coverage of the life of this lady does sometimes give me cause to wonder about whether some of the drama queens in our society should be better described as Roxies rather than Karens.

I like the idea of calling a high profile and materialistic person who is both annoying and success driven a Roxy.  A Karen is going to just lash out at the poor shop attendants and waiters she encounters.  A Roxy is going to swill champagne and preach from the gospel of success, whilst carefully curating her public image and that of her family on social media, all as part of a very calculated strategy.

Of course, it is all focused on material wellbeing, albeit of a much higher standing than that of the Karen who does not like someone walking a dog down their street or that the service in a café is too slow.  A Roxy will do things like buy a luxury car for her nine year old daughter (true story) and fly her wedding dress in from the USA in its own first class seat (again true story), and constantly set up new business ventures.  Her wants and desires (mostly fulfilled) include beach houses and Lamborginis.  

In the end, a Roxy will have more material success and a life of greater privilege than a Karen will, but it remains a shallow life.  And whilst Roxy’s husband is a rule breaker who is troubled by the existing moral order, he is no Ubermensch interested in overturning our values and mores, he is merely an insider trader who sought to enrich himself directly, rather than rely on his family’s extreme wealth.  Nor is Roxy an Ubermadchen.  She is just interested in the accumulation of wealth and fame and a higher degree of material comfort than that afforded to most members of our society, including every Karen.  That just makes her an Uberfrau.  

Nietzsche would not envy them their shallow lives with their yachts and luxury cars and palatial homes, and nor do I.  An obsession with pursuing such excesses of wealth and luxury becomes an end in itself, and is an all consuming way of passing one’s life.  I doubt that it would be a happy one.

But I do think that a term such as ‘Roxy’ is needed to describe those privileged women who live or aspire to live such lifestyles. 

Let this be my contribution to the English language. 

Historicism is one of these concepts which I first encountered during my readings for my long ago abandoned MA thesis on Nietzsche, Hegel and matters which were in vogue in the mid 1990s such as the End of History.

Historicism essentially holds to the idea that human nature changes over time, that as civilisation grows in sophistication, we change, hopefully for the better.

[Nietzsche argued something different – that the advent of Christianity saw us abandon our heroic nature, and adopt the morality of slaves.]

Whilst we are far less hairy than our distant ancestors, and probably cannot digest raw meat too readily, I am starting to think that probably Historicism is too optimistic about both human nature and our intellects.

Back in antiquity, long before we had electricity, people used to believe that plagues and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and other catastrophes were signs of the wrath of gods, needing to be assuaged by sacrifices. The exiled Athenian general and historian Thucydides was rather sardonic about such not so idle superstitions amongst his countrymen in his writings.

Early church doctor Saint Augustine, in his City of God, had to do a lot of intellectual fancy footwork to explain why the collapse of the Roman Empire around the ears of his fellow citizens was not the fault of the rise of Christianity. Earlier Christians, of course, are commonly believed to have been fed in large numbers to lions in Rome in order to offset the wrath of the gods.

Such views have continued to be held until more recent times. Look at the Spanish Inquisition and the witch burnings, including in Salem in early colonial America. These were the products of superstition and ignorance.

The Darkness was here yesterday, as Joseph Conrad wrote.

And perhaps it is here today.

The two years of this pandemic has been an object lesson in the susceptibility of large volumes of people to ignorance and modern superstition.

In previous times, where education of limited availability and there was a vested interest in keeping the people ignorant (for example, prior to the King James Version, the existence of any English translation of the Bible was banned in England so that the clergy could have a monopoly on access to and understanding of scripture), ignorance was a sad fact of life for the overwhelming majority of the populace.

Now, in the first world, where education is universal, ignorance is a choice, and therefore quite possibly unforgivable.

I read a lot of peculiar things on the internet. One of the most peculiar yet sophisticated is the theory (complete with elaborate graphics) about the various covid vaccines being actually graphene nanotubes holding the virus, programmed to release it into the bloodstream when triggered by a 5G signal.

Another intriguing one is that the various pandemics of the past century or so, going back to the influenza pandemic of 1918-20, have each been triggered by the sudden proliferation of a new type of electromagnetic radiation, with the introduction of radio, TV, then mobile phones and now 5G each more than just coinciding with a pandemic.

A supposedly leading astronomer is believed to have argued that the virus has come from Outer Space, and that the appearance and waves of disease are connected to various meteor showers at various times and parts of the world. [I am not sure how that theory can be consistent with the very terrestrial microbiology of the virus.]

What I am getting at is that whilst we are more literate than our ancestors, and we are more skeptical about the supernatural than we were, such that we do not really believe in the wrath of the Gods or witchcraft, we have not changed that much. Instead of angry gods or malevolent witches, we remain susceptible to beliefs that there are all knowing cabals which are trying to control us or enslave or destroy us. Or that there are aliens with such plans in action.

Such stuff is very easy to find on the internet, along with other topics designed to stultify rather than enlighten us.

We don’t cry ‘Witch!’ anymore, but we do something similar in relation to developers of vaccines, particularly in countries like the USA, where so many people have supposedly achieved university level educations.

That seems to be an enduring problem with human nature. Whilst we now have access at our fingertips to all the information that humanity has ever discovered, we choose so frequently either wilful ignorance or the contemporary equivalent of superstition.

Looking online at pictures of cats, whilst most unproductive, seems to be a much more harmless use of social media and the internet generally.

As a child in the 1970s, I avidly read much Enid Blyton. My favourite was the mischievous trickster Brer Rabbit, always getting the better of Brer Fox and Brer Wolf and Brer Bear with his quick wit.

It was only when I re-read a few of the stories about a decade ago that I realised, to my dismay, that Brer Rabbit is not exactly a laudable hero. He is a con-artist and a fraudster, forever taking advantage of the trust and good nature of those around him. He is what the English, of a later generation and lower social class than Mrs Blyton, would call a spiv.

From the 1980s onward, Enid Blyton has been regarded as a literary persona non grata in children’s literature by many who are too clever to believe in witches but who are still willing to burn them. She is regarded as misogynistic and racist, through her portrayal of women as weak characters in her books, and through the inclusion of golliwogs (sometimes even as the heroes, rather than as the villains).

Some even read a homo-erotic relationship into the friendship between Noddy of Toytown and his elderly neighbour Big Ears. (Whether this is seen as a thought crime in the same light as the issues raised in the previous paragraph, I leave to you, gentle reader.)

You can read what you like into Blyton. Some of her greatest critics in 1980s England were the sort of people who ruled the Greater London Council, who banned the use of the terms ‘black’ or ‘white’ coffee from the workplace, because such terms were racist (instead you had to ask for coffee with or without milk).

Getting back to Brer Rabbit. Perhaps his subliminal influence as a trickster inspired the corporate fraudsters who plagued the UK in the late 80s and early 90s, like Nick Leeson of Barings Bank fame. Maybe he read too much of Blyton’s Brer Rabbit trilogy as a child?

I never read any of her secret society stories, ie the Famous Five and Secret Six. You might argue that those inspired people, when grown to nominal adulthood (like a cretinous former friend of mine) to join real secret societies like the Freemasons (or perchance bondage dungeons?).

But I do have a passing acquaintance with Noddy of Toytown, the hero of a series of stories for younger readers, complete with colourful illustrations.

Noddy, relationship with Big Ears aside, is the most inappropriate of Blyton’s characters, when reviewed through the eyes of her modern day critics. But they have tried to save him, with some careful historical revisionism to make him socially acceptable to the 21st century reader.

Let’s compare, and then comment, on the two covers of the highly inappropriate ‘Noddy Goes To School’. First the original, and then the sanitised one.

I think you can see a subtle difference there. The Golliwog (whose name, by the way, is Gilbert), has been removed. Exiled from Toytown, if you will. He has been replaced by a monkey.

Another subtle difference is that the slipper on the wall in the original version has been removed. This is consistent with the removal of a passage from the original story, in which one of the naughty children is asked to ‘fetch the slipper’ by the teacher, so that she can give him a spanking. Corporal punishment is a no-no these days.

I think that a more savage assessment of Noddy’s modern revisionist editors could be offered. Poet and literary critic TS Eliot was scathing about the translators of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, whom he said were atheists without even realising it. In the revisionist Noddy, not only is Gilbert Golliwog exiled, but he is replaced as the principal antagonist of the story by a ‘cheeky monkey’.

You could say that not only are the characters of colour erased from Toytown completely by those revisionists, but they have chosen a ‘cheeky monkey’ as a replacement in a denial of their humanity. Those revisionists may be well meaning, in the same way that many ideological zealots are, including when they send people to the gulags, but a case could clearly be made that they are racist without even realising it, the very thought crime of which they accused Enid Blyton.