I thought I’d seen it all. I thought the world had really reached a kind of ‘rock bottom’ normally reserved for wartime levels of ‘atrocious’, for acts of genocide, for apocalyptic meteorological phenomena, for tsunamis, even for Donald Trump. I thought nothing could surprise any longer. Until yesterday. 

When I saw a brand new Porsche. Plugged in!!!! Like ‘WHATTTT?’ I thought a family of gypsies were living in it and needed the power for their tv and washing machine. I thought all sorts of things. Including ‘why is that Porsche tied to a lamppost? Doesn’t it have an anti-theft device?’ And then I looked and saw the most dreaded letter in the history of all alphabets, emblazoned on the boot. The letter that makes grown men cry. That leaves superheroes, of a certain generation, beating themselves up with sticks and stones. The letter… “E”!!!!

It still looks like a Porsche. It probably still goes (almost) like a Porsche. But it sounds like… it sounds like… like a Tesla. It sounds like my car when its switched off. The sound of nothing. Simon and Garfunkel would turn in their graves. Except they’re both alive and well. 

The University of York has always had pretensions of grandeur. All of the City of York has really. Whereas the reality is that its just another almost industrial town in the nation’s northern floodplain. The bit of  the country we sacrifice willingly to the Gods of the weather so that London may stay dry and secure. Anyway, now York Uni has decided to make ‘a statement’. And a statement worthy of its pretentions. It is going to abolish one of its usual images. The classic ‘3 monkeys’ image (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil), used to symbolise intelligence and part of the university’s long-term iconography on printed matter and digital media. No fucking more! Enough of that shit; it is (according to the very clever people in York)… racist!!!

How can 3 monkeys be racist? Monkeys are all brown. I don’t get it. Furthermore, that image is Japanese and goes back centuries to represent cleverness and… brains and shit. Ahhhh, say the wise men of York (nothing like as wise as the monkeys obviously), anything to do with a monkey is ipso facto racist because racists use that animal in its tropes and racial abuse. Most modern racists wave Union Jack flags around but no-one’s banning that. Yet ask any minority person which intimidates them more: a 6 foot 5 skinhead with a swastika tatooed on his face waving round a Union Jack, or a monkey eating nuts, go on, ask him. 

I have never considered the 3 monkeys image… well, anything other than the 3 wise monkeys. Were they part of the slave trade? Were they alt-right monkeys? Trump supporting primates? York University is, I fear, suffering from premature woke-imagination. They’ve taken a sign of intelligence to make themselves look stupid. 

Happy Friday

A xxxx