Christina Patterson: If in doubt, blame the Government

The heading was "Government fun". Underneath it, were figures to make your eyes pop. Twenty five million for this. Forty million for that. Yes, the Government had been naughty and must be heavily fined. It had, apparently, failed to anticipate that the Lord would, in a rare note of First-Third World even-handedness, extend his wrath not just to the people of Hull (a species, to most southerners, as unfamiliar as the people of Bangladesh) but yea, also, to the hard-working families of Henley.

It's one thing to twiddle your tagliatelle in front of images of villages washed away, and women in saris bewailing the loss of homes and lives. It's quite another to watch couples in Boden jumpers surveying the floating wreck of their kitchen and their new oak floors. Bloody hell, this is real. This is us. This is tragedy on a mass scale. Do you have any idea how long it took us to find that Aga?

As the figures racked up so did the scale of the crime. The Government had been warned. Someone had mentioned that flood defences were a bit iffy. They hadn't necessarily predicted the most dramatic summer rainfall since records began, but some other think-tank-Nosferatu surely had. Yup, the Government should have known and now it must pay.

The Government had also been warned about mass terror attacks. And bird flu. And Aids. And nuclear war with Iran. And perhaps now with Russia. It should build a giant arc for those in flood plains, or perhaps a colossal umbrella. Emergency services should be increased ten-fold and should wait, like coiled springs, for disaster to strike. We must all have bird-flu vaccine and anti-retrovirals and Herceptin and clean hospitals, but no mixed wards. And the Government must pay for it all. But never, obviously, by putting taxes up.

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" was an understandable cry from a young man who had worked his socks off for the Almighty only to be informed that he was about to be nailed to a giant wooden cross and left to die. Job's wife's pithier suggestion to "Curse God and die!" also made perfect sense once God had allowed Satan to wipe out his family and cover his body with sores. In the end, however, with Middle Eastern Monty Python grit, he continued to "look on the bright side". Job, clearly, was no 21st-century Brit.

When disaster strikes, most of us no longer have a God to curse or praise. And the stiff upper lip, and the Dunkirk spirit, seem to have faded as our sense of entitlement has grown. We have to blame someone, and so we blame the Government. Anger is a normal response to trauma, of course, and there's no doubt that losing your home is trauma. I'd want to blame someone, too.

The Government will indeed have to pay to salvage lives and hopes from the wreckage. That, as Americans say, is the deal. Only a nation of babies, however, would confuse a bunch of men, and the odd woman, charged with the limited public purse we allow them, with the divine attributes of prophecy, prevention and cure. What do we want? A grown-up democracy, where conflicting demands are weighed in the balance and agreed?

It seems not. We want a mummy to kiss us better and a sugar-daddy to foot the bill. We want a giant slot screen in the sky where you state your demands and they're instantly granted. What we want, in fact, is Noel Edmonds' cosmic ordering service. One day, we'll get the government we deserve.

Give girls a childhood, and some twigs

In my day (gosh, I never thought I'd write those words) you had to make a washing-up stand by lashing together twigs. As a Girl Guide, you learnt how to make a gooey dough wrapped round a stick and toast it while singing "Ging Gang Gooly" at an open fire. You got badges for laundry, pathfinding and flower-arranging.

And now, you don't gather sticks to make furniture, you buy it! You nip down to Croydon and load up the car with flatpacks. And when you've assembled it, you get a badge. If, that is, you're not too busy getting Brown Owl to teach you the mysteries of money, sex and Microsoft. So, another hobby hijacked in the name of "life skills". Give the poor girls some twigs and flowers. Give them, in fact, a childhood.

* It isn't always easy to justify the ways of management to man. You spend a fortune on consultants and reports and guess what? The troops rebel. Yes, even in that Utopian dream of a welfare state called Sweden. In this country so polite that it refused to stand up even to Hitler (opting instead for that Swedish cop-out, "neutrality"), a country in which people politely pay their (sky-high) taxes and stick to the (impossibly low) speed limit even when alone in the forest, servants rarely stand up to their masters.

Even Swedes, however, have their limits. An internal report commissioned by Sweden's tax authority suggested that the organisation should be restructured in groups no larger than 150. This being the optimum number suggested by studies of apes. Now can you name a great ape tennis player? Or pop group? No, you can't. With true Scandinavian passion, staff said they "seriously questioned" the findings of the study. Senior management has yet to comment.

c.patterson@independent.co.uk