For me, ancestry is just one thing that connects us to people, and feeling connected to other people is generally a good thing, as long as one kind of connection does not have primacy over all the others. Heredity, race and nationhood are not the best criteria by which to judge our fellow humans.
Being in the latter stages of life means the morning is unkind to the reflection. It takes a few hours for the creases to fall out. By about 4 P.M., I look quite nice.
I think ageing suits me because I was born old, like Spencer Tracy or Dolly the Sheep.
Marriage is like the witness protection programme: you get all new clothes, you live in the suburbs, and you're not allowed to see your friends anymore.
All socialists have bad backs because we slouch — except when we're watching the news when we sit on the edge of our seats, shout, and wave our arms. Generally we sit hunched, arms crossed in a judgemental way, the whole of our bodies pulled into a frown.
My daughter wanted a new pair of trainers. I told her You're eleven, make your own!
“People say, well it doesn’t pay them to work, ’cause they are on benefits. Jobs should not be that badly paid, should they? If getting a job means you’re worse off, there’s something wrong with the job, I think. Call me old-fashioned.” February 18th 2011.
Sandi Toksvig: “Jeremy: who says the children are better off with ‘a little buddha discipline’?”
Jeremy Hardy: “Somebody, the leader of the ATL, which is the Association of Teachers and Lecher- Lecturers, which is randy teachers, says that middle class children are pampered little buddhas. I don’t get the reference, coz you think of the Buddha as being a sort of semi-clad, obese, you know, bi-polar paperweight. Was the Buddha pampered, I thought he was ascetic, I thought he moaned around saying, ‘Oh no, no more for me, thanks, I’m the Buddha’, being, sort of quiet, you know, and modest and that. Well, we know that middle class parents indulge their children, because they all think, Michael is so bright, very, very bright, that’s why they’re doing so badly in school, because they’re so bright. The [teachers] don’t understand their answers, you see. I think the reason they misbehave is because they’re bored in the [classrooms], because they’re so bright. They’re not being stretched. Properly. And Hermione is so bright, and that’s why she misbehaves, I think, she’s so much brighter than the other children, and that’s why she sets fire to them, I think.”
“They won’t concentrate on the children of the poor, ‘Oh, these terrible chav children, it’s awful, they’re all gypsies and they’re terrible, and they park their caravans in the class room, with their illegal, violent dogs, and they’re all footpads and highwaymen, and it’s all terrible, and these days your child daren’t go to a state school, because they will be immediately impregnated, by some awful, beastly costermonger’s child, and it’s terrible, and actually, it turns out that the worst and most badly behaved, lazy and indulged children are children of the middle class, in schools, and it’s the industrious, hard-working children, barefoot children from those parts of the country where the old fish mines have closed that are much maligned, they’re the salt of the earth, and it’s all the children with stupid, made-up names like Hosepipe and Otterworm, where…”
“The ones who can afford it put their children in private schools, where they make them wear these preposterous uniforms, and you think, don’t make them [wear], that’s a stone magnet is that blazer, you’ve just turned your child, by making them wear vermillion trouser suits, and, you know, a sort of Norman French falconer’s gauntlet, you’ve made them into a pebble target!”
Toksvig: “Jeremy, you’ll have to stop, because I’m going to die!” M1y 1st, 2012.
“[…] and people are suggesting that maybe he [Bradley Manning] joined the army in order to release information, rather than join the army for honourable reasons, like the desire to kill people for money.” August 2nd 2013.
“And the government does often look like a country house weekend. I mean, it’s like an episode of Poirot except none of the buggers have the decency to get poisoned. […] Because people think, ‘Politicians are as they are because they just don’t know–‘ they know exactly what goes on in the world, they just don’t care, is the problem. What would happen if you got a load of poor people to confront the elite, and say, ‘You know, it’s terrible having no money’, all the elite would say is, ‘Yes, we rather thought it would be, that’s why we don’t share our riches, now run along, you’re becoming tiresome’.” November 15th 2013
“People who know about maths tend to be richer, because they can’t form relationships and don’t have any dependents.” March 14th 2014
Many thanks to all those Jeremy Hardy sites....bless
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