On sticking your oar into local politics where it's not wanted

On sticking your oar into local politics where it's not wanted

I wrote a letter to my local paper. One or two things about my home town need to be said:

Dear The Dorset Echo,

I note with a certain amount of consternation a campaign by the older generation of this fine seaside resort of Weymouth against the bulldozing of the venerable old - and frankly, crumbling - Pavilion Theatre and the nearby collection of shacks laughably known as the International Ferry Terminal (Last Monday's Echo: "Pavilion project rockets to £130m and first born son of every Weymouth citizen").

Granted that many of our senior residents have a great emotional attachment to the building, having hand-built the place themselves from sea shells and visiting plague rats, however, they really ought to realise that you cannot stand in the way of progress, nor the spiked wheels of the developers' wrecking machines, itching to wreak their awful destruction on the Ocean Room and any tea-dance goers that didn't get out in time.

It would be a right old laugh to see them try, though.

But, no! We've heard it all before from these senile delinquents* with their "We're bored - there's nothing to do around here" before careering around town in their Shopmobility scooters and glaring at people who hold up the queue in the Post Office on a Thursday.

Frankly, I am sick of it. These old duffers built the old theatre with their own bare hands - they can tear it down again and build a shining new one in its place, complete with the promised 200 foot statue of a mini-skirted Kylie Minogue, straddling the Weymouth Harbourside like a knickerless colossus.

And being "bored ASBO-fodder", they'd be quite happy to work for the price of their Old Age Pension (and a copy of Naughty Over Forty thrown in for the old blokes) to keep the costs of this mammoth project down for we, the hard-working Council Tax payers of this Borough.

When the whole thing's finished, I will be quite happy to look any of the survivors in the eye at the inaugural grab-a-granny night and offer them my thanks for a job well done.

I am not mad.

Yours etc

Albert O'Balsam, Wyke Regis

* (c) Python (Monty) 1971

Today's challenge: Sixty-nine comments and I'll send it in.

Today's other challenge: Choose tomorrow's Tale of Mirth and Woe from the following list. One of them might be on the subject of onanism. Can you guess which?

• Launcher: "And he pulled and he pulled and he pulled at the big red lever, but only dust came out"
  
• Leaving James Behind: "His nose streaming, he went straight upstairs to his room with nothing but a box of Kleenex and something to read"
  
• Red Card: "I am charging you, me laddo, with three counts of assault and battery against His Holiness the Bishop of Bath and Wells. What say you to that?"
  
• Shandy: "Three lager tops, please, mein host, heavy on the lemonade if you'd be so kind"

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