Gordon Brown today announced a "compulsory volunteer scheme" for under 19s aimed at thrusting today's youth into the community while they're still pimpled and idealistic.
Anything that makes the lives of schoolyoungsters more stressful and unhappy than was mine is fine by me, notwithstanding the seemingly straightfaced Orwellianism of compulsory volunteering or the fact that the blueprint for the idea bears the carbon smudges of a Tory idea dismissed by the lesser-spotted Miliband as "hugely expensive". In fact the notion takes me back to the time my own alma mater enforced a similarly inspired "community service" on my peers as 16 year olds, the upshot of which saw me spend every Wednesday afternoon in a church-cum-museum cafe wringing out dishcloths and politely laughing at the bawdy banter of middle-aged dinner ladies. The finer points of HRT went over my head, but I did learn from an email posted on the kitchen wall that deodorants cause armpit cancer. Or antiperspirants. As a result I went home and promptly binned my entire Lynx collection. This was shortly before Lynx embarked on its strategy of silently discontinuing low-selling scents (Java, Indigo) and re-releasing them six months later under a new name (Mystico, Ramraid). Had I not been conned into throwing away my old sprays I would now be in a position to prove this cheap marketing scam and blackmail Lynx for every penny they have. I hope Gordon Brown thinks very carefully before subjecting future generations to this sort of financial detriment.
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