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Using your face, that is. Remonstrating with your own face is fine, but not in public. Anyway. If I’m not feeling entertaining, I might as well be irritable. Today it is Ruth Kelly who is irritating me. Here are the things about Ruth Kelly that irritate me:

1. Her face

There’s more to it than that, of course, but mostly it boils down to her face. This time it’s something that came out of her face. Hit it, Ruth:

I do think translation has been used too frequently and sometimes without thought added to the consequences. So, for example, it’s quite possible for someone to come here from Pakistan and elsewhere in the world and to find that materials are routinely translated into their mother tongue and therefore not have the incentive to learn English.

Yes, in this story Ruth (pictured below preventing her face from invading Poland) continues the rather bizarre trend of Labour pandering to small-minded idiots who are unaccountably concerned that they won’t be able to order some of what they undoubtedly consider to be “filthy foreign muck”. Why on earth people who have less contact with brown people than Prince Charles’s underwear and who consider anything with more flavour than frozen peas to be a sign of dangerous culinary licentiousness should be concerned about communicating with the Azims down at number 43 is beyond me, particularly given the paucity of conversational material they’ll have available should some sort of detente inexplicably be reached, but there you go. My, what a long sentence.

Leaving aside little Britain’s prejudices, let’s move on to Ruth, who really ought to know better. Of course, she doesn’t, as her face is to logical reasoning what the presence of an elderly nude man is to the proper enjoyment of a fish supper. She starts out well, mind you, in stating that learning the English language is “key” to helping migrants to integrate.

Where she falls down, of course, is everywhere else. And unlike normal falling down, which is funny, Ruth and her face fall down in deeply annoying ways. From this fixation with language-as-integrator she leaps like a gazelle with an annoying face to the conclusion that the government should stop translating its bureaucratic documents. In so doing, she makes lots of ludicrous assumptions, which I will now point out so that enterprising (read: less lazy than me) members of the public can print them out and staple them to her face.

Firstly, she assumes that immigrants aren’t already integrating. This is a boring one. Even someone with a normal face could make this mistake. So, too, the assumption that the government should Do Something. I covered this earlier, but it’s so ingrained into politicians’ minds that to hold it specifically against Ruth would seem churlish. It would also involve getting closer to her face than is prudent, so let’s keep our powder dry.

No, the most glaring little idiocy, it seems to me, is Kelly’s blithe assumption that immigrants essentially have one motivation in life, and one motivation only: to comprehend local authority forms. Now, let it not be said that an evening spent parsing the H19-B (application for auxiliary wheelie bin) is not an enthralling night for all the family (section C aside, which contains language, and scenes of mild peril). But in the end, I really do question whether newly arrived migrants’ main aspirational concern is to penetrate the core of English bureaucracy, and taste the sweet fruits therein.

After all, this is hardly Tolstoy, for whose appreciation learning Russian is considered by some to be a prerequisite, and whose reward of comprehension might truly be worth the effort. Indeed, those of us in near full command of the English language are painfully aware that government forms are fully capable of being incomprehensible in whatever language you try to decipher them. In fact, given that translators go through years of training, while form-writers seem to need no more qualification than a deep hatred of the reader, it’s quite possible that applying for a passport in Swahili is considerably easier than it is in the original English.

Now, I realise that Ruth, whose entire life will have been subsumed by politics from an early age, might not comprehend that there are those of us who have other pursuits, other joys in our lives than heading down to the council offices to read some pamphlets on parking practices. So what I would like you, both of my loyal readers, to do, is this: write to Ruth Kelly. Perhaps sympathise with her about her face. But then describe to her a joy in your life. It may be the smile of a newborn baby; it may be the frisson of excitement you get from being thrown out of maternity wards - I don’t know. But maybe - just maybe - if we can convince this woman and her face that life outside of government does indeed exist, then the mist will clear from her eyes, and she will run away to join the circus as God surely intended.

If you could write to her in Urdu, that would be even better.

Today I shall be conducting a lesson in logic for the fearful. Having observed at first hand the deleterious effects of mild peril on the rational abilities of the trembling classes, I think it’s only fair to start from the very start. So, what is a syllogism? Defined by Aristotle, a syllogism is the basis of deductive reasoning, in which a conclusion is inferred from two premises. For example:

1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Seems fine, right? And indeed, mortals and minor television celebrities alike have been using such inference systems (whether wittingly or not) since the birth of civilisation, or at least since their shows got greenlighted (-lit?). Of course there’s more to it than this; quantification and set theory get involved, but if you can comprehend the above example, you’re fully equipped to enter into philosophic debate with the best of them. Indeed Socrates, as implied above, is quite dead - you have the upper hand over one of the finest minds in history.

Of course, as with any fine tool, the syllogism is open to abuse (“I placed the can-opener in my rectum all the better to grip the handle, officer”). Consider the following example, beloved of politicians and football managers:

1. Something must be done.
2. This is something.
3. Therefore, we must do this.

This faulty yet plausible-looking reasoning has landed us at various points with the Millennium Dome, the 3-day week, the asymmetric mullet and the sweeper formation. Dangerous, n’est-ce pas? Oh, my friends, you have no idea.

I come at this point to the very fulcrum of my lesson, the personal experience which drove me to attempt to educate the quivering masses. A very specific line of reasoning, the example runs (as best I can tell) thus:

1. Terrorists exist.
2. They have hair.
3. Therefore, we should take away Simon’s shampoo.

Over the course of a 48-hour sojourn to Dublin, I have been relieved of: one bottle of Loreal Elvive shampoo; one bottle of Garnier Fructis shampoo (purchased, with official blessing, to replace the former); two bottles of Mint Source shower gel; and one can of Nivea under-arm deodorant (“Silk” fragrance). In this manner, apparently, was the safety of the British Isles preserved for another slightly smelly day.

Timid people of the world; hear me! My shampoo does not threaten you with anything more worrisome than blinding glossiness. The number of times my hair wax has successfully exploded a jet full of innocents can be counted on Abu Hamza’s right hand (oops). That one time I laid waste to an opulent and arrogant western civilisation using only my armpits was indeed an unfortunate incident, but I have learnt from my mistakes, and moved on. Please, I beg of you; let me shower in peace, and stop placing the logical can-opener that is syllogism in the metaphorical rectum of your fear. It just makes it, and me, smell shitty.

I think they have OCD. It’s the only explanation. Why else would they reject bags of perfectly good rubbish based solely on the colour of the bag? As I type this, there rests outside our front door one forlorn sack of onion cuttings, Pots (ex-Noodle) and furry formerly-decorative fruit (only slightly used). Its crime? Being blue. Our binmen apparently didn’t know how to deal with this outrageous violation of the sacred norms of binmanning (or “The Job”, as they call it). So they left it.

Are health and safety regulations preventing our binmen from touching erroneously toned bags? Did it clash too glaringly with the orange of our recycling bags, offending their Changing Rooms-honed aesthetics? Does blue denote a hitherto unknown rubbish category which is collected by binmen with special training in such bags? What do they think we’ve put in it? They took away almost a complete dead pig once, because we’d managed to cover it in enough (black) bags. I don’t know what makes these grizzled, smelly men balk at an unassuming bag of odds ‘n ends, but if they’re not touching it, I’m certainly not. Fortunately, I have learnt from lengthy experiments in our fridge a universal truth: everything turns black if you leave it long enough.

Yep, it’s that time at last. There comes a point in every young man’s life when he decides to fly the coop; usually about the same time that the young man realises he’s living in a coop, not a house. This is why coops are constructed at ground level, as the young man will shortly make a second horrible discovery, and no-one wants him to fall too far.

Anyway, the point of this is that Will and I are moving away from Balham, our home for the last four years. In that time, like a weary pornstar it’s gone from up and coming to well and truly upped and come. The borough of a thousand catchphrases is now positively glowing and sticky with respectability; we even have an organic supermarket, where the organs are plentiful but shoppers still somewhat scarce.

In our time at this house we have set fire to many things. Dan set fire to the whole garden almost as soon as we got here. Will set fire to an electronic dancing chicken. We set fire to enough Christmas trees to fuel a fragrantly pine-scented power station. We set fire to a whole pig. Will wanted to set the pig spinning at 120rpm while on fire, but we thought that would have been a bit showy. Understatement is everything when you’re setting fire to pigs.

But it’s not all been conflagration. We built a snowman in the front doorway one winter, and a passing Brazilian asked us to take his photo with it. The snowmanwall melted (overnight; not because of the Brazilian’s immense warmth), deluging the basement (and thus Tim, who was occupying it at the time) with frigid water. Oh, how we laughed. Speaking of the basement, we had an indigent millionaire living down there for a while, which was as confusing as it sounds. In fact, the basement has been occupied for a total of over a year since we moved in, despite the rather obvious downsides of slugs and descending snowmen to name but two.

Anyway. Having remained here while, by my count, no fewer than 14 other residents passed through, it’s time for pastures new. In my case that involves a daring voyage north of the river where I shall join the residents of Kentish Town in fending off disoriented trendies overflowing from Camden; in Will’s case he’s going to live in an actual pasture for a bit. The young man never falls far from the coop.

* This only works if you pronounce Balham “Blaahm”, as a posh person might. Try it with a nice Chablis, or while striking a poor person.