Re: Storeys in BrEng

X-No-Archive: yes

In message <Xns99DFBA851D1D8rabrabbjbyahocom@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Barbara Bailey <rabrabbjb@xxxxxxxxxx> writes

We *do* tend toward sprawl a bit. <g> The neighborhood I live in now has
what many people would consider small lots and ver small houses, and and
the lots are still about 45' X 125', with the average house having
between 750 and 800 sq. ft. per floor -- but many are two stories with a
full basement for upwards of 2000 sq. ft. total.

God, it's fun being a kid in England today now that we're taken over.

Most of the restaurants in Guildford, indeed in the whole country, are geared to our tastes. Pizza Huts,, Hamburger Kings -- tuck shop food for all! It's wunderful being a kid in England today.

The whole of the Guildford retail industry now seems to be run by kids.

Some of us have taken over television. There's Willy the Whoosher with his patent whoosh generator. He's making a fortune on programmes such as Eggheads and Location, Location, Location. Just count up the number kiddiwink whoosh noises you hear and work out just how much Willy is making at 20p per whoosh.

Then there's Jingle Jimbo and his music segments. Thousands of 'em. Telly can't work anymore without kiddiwinkian music segments poured over everything like choccy sauce. Preferably with plenty of compression to drive the grown-ups mad. They needed over 40 music segments on a special Location Location Location last week to decide that Epsom was a neat place to live. Even the kids making up the news programmes love music -- specially lots of loud drums thumping away. Gosh -- what super fun! 'Hundreds deaded in Dafur Massacre!' Boom! Boom! Boom!

One grown-up even threatened to send 14000 of us children who run the BBC back to skool to have the ethos of 'make believe' educated out of us! Fancy sending us to skool! The nerve! On the day that he said that, we made a Yet Another Dreary property programme which featured a trilling tamponette going on about how a year ago her producers followed the fortunes of a couple in their search for a house 'and now we're back to find out how they're getting on!'. Cut to interior. Hallway. FX: Front door chimes. Housewife goes to answer front door, not noticing film crew and sound recordists in her hall. Housewife answers door and screeches in surprise when she sees trilling tamponette.

Even better: when we wanted to show a brunette with big tits shopping and cooking for her family we could've shown her hopping on a bus and be done with it. Wot No Make Believe? Nah... We hired a bus and recruited some Equity members as passengers!

Us kids love faking facts in BBC documentaries. Last week we hired Mr Alan Titchmarsh to front a doccy about England's wildlife. There he was sitting in a rowboat on Lake Ness to do a piece to camera in which he rubbished the Lake Ness 'monster' saying that there weren't enough nutrients in the lake to sustain a monster. As he said that, viewers were treated to the sound FX of a roaring monster and the sight of Mr Titchmarsh looking suitably terrified.

Then there are our TV competitions. The grown-ups are being really mean about them. Instead of being allowed to dish out premium phone numbers and tell viewers to phone them to give us money, which would be sensible, the grown-ups insist that there must be some skill involved. The really big cash prizes are on five's property programmes. Some serious pocket money involved. "Q: When a property is sold at an auction, it is said to A: Come under the chisel; B: come under the hammer; or C: under the mallet?". All very silly but introducing a skill element keeps the grown-ups off our backs.

Worryingly there are signs in telly that the grown-ups are fighting back. Some years ago we dumped the awful News at Ten and that bumbling scotchman, Trev (who looks more like a negative photograph each day) because it mucked up re-runs of James Bond and Star Wars movies. Having 40minutes of Trev in the middle of The Empire Striking Back just wasn't on. Now the grown-ups are getting stroppy and want News at Ten back. The fight goes on but us kids will win in the long run.

A week ago our fellow kids on BBC news drooled about how it was the six month anniversary since the disappearance of Maddy. The grown-up who later whibbled about how you can't have six month anniversaries and if we knew a smattering of Latin we'd know what the anni meant in anniversary was well out of order. Learn proper English and Latin roots? That would mean going to skool!

Squeeze and tease on end credits drives grown-up up the wall. Whoopee! Even Ofcom have muttered about that, and several unions whose members feel that they lose a screen credit. But none of us kids take any notice.

Us kids are having a wonderful time being dished out with free police uniforms. We don't even have to learn to be policemen because that would mean going back to skool. Nah. We've got a wonderful scheme going. We get a real cool uniform and a two-way radio and we get called community assistance officers or street sentinels, or something like that. We can just stand around and watch people drown. Great fun.

We've got cool new uniforms to wear as border police. All we have to do is stand around at airports looking fierce and glare at hordes of Polands and Romanians and Estonians as they trundle trolley loads of suitcases passed us crammed with real guns.

Best of all are that the grown-ups now allow us kiddies to have proper Wendy houses in our back gardens. Until now local councils run by grown-ups wouldn't allow us to build profitable full-size Wendy houses in back gardens -- specially in Surrey which has lots of big back gardens. So the government brought in this appeal system. You go to them and they say we need lots of houses all over the country so you go ahead. So houses are popping up in back gardens all over the place and we've got lots of spare dosh to spend down the tuck shops.

Of course it's in business where us kids have had the most fun. A bank nearly ran out of pocket money recently, and BCCI really did have to yank out its pocket linings, so did Baring and Equitable Life; Lloyds nearly went the same way, too, as did BSB and Marconi. Of course there are going to be a few mistakes -- such as us kids sacking all M&S's experienced buyers, but a few minor hiccups are inevitable when you let us kids take over everything.

But our real triumph is in guns. Years ago us kids had to make do with toy cap guns. What a difference the Single European Act has made! Today's guns are very different.

Now it's more a case of: 'Bang! You really are dead!'

It's such fun being a kid in England today. It's like having a second set of opposed thumbs; we can break so much.

--
James Follett. Novelist. (G1LXP) http://www.jamesfollett.dswilliams.co.uk
Bloody Earthsearch on BBC7 every weekend for nearly six months and now Power
Corp are to make a movie of Follett's ICE.
http://scripts.digicc.com/powtv/prog_synopsis.php?id=655

.

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