Politics and Hedgehog sit together as comfortably as a sadistic cat* and a feisty hamster, as ably proven by my previous bluster on politicians and their arrogance. And yet after a mere five minute immersion into the 24 hours news pool, I find myself again arguing passionately for a benevolent dictatorship.

The problem I have with yet more indirect taxation is that it comes with a smug veneer of social policy attached. And by doing so, perpetuates the myth that by taxing great swathes of the population, actual changes are going to be made in the way people live their lives.

And that is total bollocks.

It isn’t going to stop people drinking or smoking. It’s not going to fix the health problem of the middle class trudging home – after the longest working hours in europe – and downing a bottle of supermarket wine. Granted, it may divert the tiny disposable income of those in very low paid families away from useful stuff like food. But it won’t stop anyone who can afford eighty grand of sports car driving it away because there is an additional£1000 of tax, and yet it may keep older, more polluting cars on the road while the rest of us baulk at the ever increasing tax burden of buying new.

This kind of indirect taxation is nothing short of licensed theft. And it’s not fair because when it’s imposed on stuff 45 million people consume, it is almost completely biased against those on lower incomes. It doesn’t achieve anything except to shore up a level of financial incompetence, that could better manage the public finances by stuffing the tax receipts in a sock.

So I have an idea – let’s assume that these latest increases price most of us out of the market. So now we do exactly what the government is promoting – we abandon our nicatine habit, we drink water instead of beer, we make our own wine from nettles or shuttle cheap booze from French supermarkets. We don’t drive anywhere, everyone rides a bike or a donkey and we bloody well break the link between pious populism and actual economics.

Wouldn’t it be great to see the blood drain from the faces of those stuffed shirts when we actually do what they tell us? Then they’d be faced with the very real prospect of having to stop fighting other people’s wars, abandon fattening up their bloated departments with policies no one cars about, and get back to distributing wealth from the rich to the poor, and making the bloody trains run on time.

I’ve given myself dislexia by proxy irritation writing this**. Therefore all I can suggest is we allow this wave of impotant anger to wash over us and remain clam.

* How that failed to trigger the tautology filter I do no know.

** I have also turned into my Dad apparently.

…. and I’ll have pie if I want to. A contemporary re-working of an eighties classic there which seems appropriate as I lurch unhappily into my fifth decade. Signs of aging were all around this morning – the air felt too cold, the coffee too hot and my stumbling assemblage of commuting collateral finished in broken zip and some choice swearing.

Apparently anxiety and grumpiness are all part of being middle aged according to the venerable beeb. Which is excellent news because a) this means it’s not my fault and b) misery loves company.

And then again, maybe not. Riding to the station this morning, sunnies on, green fields bathed in sky to sky blue, it occurred to me that it was a little chilly and being a klutz is my standard operational model. So maybe age is a state of mind rather than a state of physical or mental fragility.

Try as I might, I could not locate my inner grumpy and my mood improved further after having a rolling chat with the man who built and rides the bamboo bike. Refreshingly bonkers in the “because I can” engineering mindset and soon he’s to add a full suspension woody two wheeler to his copse of all things barking.

A quick inventory shows I still have most of my own teeth, a barnfull of expensive bikes and sufficient money to buy beer. That’s not a bad return for forty years of slacking so if this is as good as it gets, it’s good enough for me.

And to top it all, today was the first day I realised that Elvis’ and I share a birthday/deathday. So on that happy coincidence, Alex is leaving the building (but only to go to the pub). Uh-huh.

I’ve starting making lists; lists of things I want to do; lists of things I think I should want to do and “ much smaller “ lists of things I’ve actually done. What separates them from each other, apart from reality and fantasy, is the 22^nd anniversary of my 18^th Birthday.

And because forty feels like an age where extreme physical tasks may be aspirational at best, this inventory of want should probably be classified as stuff to do before I’m dead.

Bu before that this – kicking off on the younger side of the fence, here’s my top ten of stuff happily filed in a Pandora’s box marked Done and don’t come back.

10. Have Kids
I love my kids, of course I do but Lordy I certainly wouldn’t want anymore. The statistical probability of adding a fourth female to a family of two daughters and one wife is simply too terrifying. I’ve seen blokes burdened with that demographic and they look hunted. And poor.

9. Properly crash a car
Smashing up your car (or, for preference, somebody else’s) is a rite of passage from short trousered road hoodlum to middle aged, elbow-padded law abider who revels in the knowledge his sensible car won towing vehicle of the year in What Caravan? I’m dangerous enough on a mountain bike, so¾ of a ton of powered metal battering ram is not really crashing material anymore.

8. Wake up with a stranger
As opposed to going to bed with a sex goddess. You know that terrible waking feeling of spinning sky, intense urge to vomit and geographical discombobulation? It is hardly improved when followed by cruel sunlight shafting your hazy mental image that last night you pulled a super model. Leave your mates number, grab trousers and run.

7. Go on a proper bender
The kind of weekend where you go out drinking on Friday night and wake up Sunday morning on a freezing train platform without any shoes. Still in a suit but otherwise unrecognisable from the young, thrusting professional of 36 hours earlier. A goat has slept in your mouth and left with your cash, you mobile phone is covered in a slick glaze of beer and kebab and some street person has robbed you of your footwear.

And you have a hangover sharp enough to shave with. No thanks, never again. Not after last time.

6. Own a motorbike
Many people “ well blokes anyway “ trigger a Pavlovian two wheeled urge on hitting forty. It’s best described as squeezing middle aged spread into tight leathers and smearing oneself under lorry wheel some twenty minutes later. I’ve crashed too many motorbikes to ever want another one. Probably not anyway. Well not this year at any rate.

5. Buy a house
We bought this house and subsequently checked into the financial hospital of the monetary crippled. If we tried to do the same now, we’d be making Faustian deals with the devil and mortgaging our souls. House ownership have the weary trappings of repair, potential DIY and a permanent drain on disposable cash. But short of living in a cardboard box under a bridge, it’s hard to see an alternative.

Actually if we had to buy a house now, the box would be the alternative although marketed as Bijou and Compact Residence near major road links and with undisturbed views of countryside

4. Be poor
See above. As a student I was poor but so was everyone. And in those days we had overdrafts, summer jobs and “ in the case of the posh undergrads “ wealthy parents. While I kind of support the right on theory that money doesn’t make you happy, you have to balance that with being poor generally doesn’t either. I’m a financial train wreck at the best of times but it’s kid of nice to know that such behaviour doesn’t starve the children. Not yet, anyway.

3. Survive a parachute jump
I’m not good with heights and even worse with exposure. Phrases such as plummet to a fiery death instantly supplant airline safety briefings. Jumping out of a perfectly serviceable aeroplane was, without doubt, the most traumatic experience of my life. I didn’t want to be in a small plane, being buffeted around like a storm blown leaf, nor did a single atom of Al see any just cause for chucking itself out into the abyss. I got to know “ up front and personal – what terminal velocity looked like and from thereon in, I tried hard to stick to terra firma. The more firma, the less terror..

2. Go Mountain Bike Racing
I was rubbish at 33 and I’d be even rubbisher now. At 40 you qualify for the Veterans’ class and it’s all sinewy, grizzled racers with fitness, endurance and race craft. I’d be lapped on the start line. And while I loved the whole scene, I hated the actual racing. My last 12 hour race was so spectacularly bad, it ended with me grumping in a chair, drinking beer and smoking cigars at 4am in the morning. And that was the best bit by some distance.

1. Being 39
Apparently age is no barrier to progress. Yet being 39 has felt a bit like it was. There’s something transitory that wasn’t there at 29 and certainly never even entered my naval gazing orbit ten years before that. I’m not wild about crossing another one way frontier but I’ll be glad when it’s done. So this is where life begins eh?

Knowing my readers are troubled by a low threshold of attention deficit even when compared to a special needs goldfish, I’ve been ruthless in my selection. The remaining five hundred or so, including gems such as send wine back and understand the art of grouting, shall remain electronically welded to Pandora’s bosom. The lucky things.

Next up, all the exciting tasks I set myself at the age of thirty that I’ve yet to complete. Where the hell did those ten years go?

… now there was a couplet to strike terror into the heart of any freelance consultant. Fiscally, it didn’t get much worse than that unless the project sponsor was hit by the belated realisation that all your talk of stabilising event horizons or evangilising synergistic operating efficiencies was nothing more that total bollocks wrapped up in bullshit. It only ever got worse when your thin lipped accountant started nervously quoting sarbanes-oxley as you explained you’d bought a small yacht for the purposes of “business development“.

But even at our worst, which I grudgingly accept was on the euphemistic edge of dishonest, we were merely street magicians compared to Gorden “David Copperfied” Brown and his financial slights of hand. Politics rarely infect the hedgehog as it lacks the catharticism of other posts and leaves me wanting to throw the monitor into the local offices of the council. Plus, of course, I know bugger all about it although that is rarely a semantic leash to my random rabbit chasing doggedness.

But the porridge gobbler has gone too far this time. While one hand giveth, the other slaps you lightly about the face, joyfully explaining you’re screwed anyway. While I have absolutely no problem with a taxation system earnestly charting wealth redistribution through a sea of tax increases, I’ll be buggered if anyone is going to tell me that in some way it’s doing me a financial favour.

Personally I may more tax or I may pay a little less. Frankly, I don’t give a shit but I do care that a government that has crusaded as the bastion of public services appears to have spent everything while delivering very little. So while we’re laying off nurses and targets replace common sense, I’ve come up with a new idea. And I’m telling you because there is absolutely no bloody point in pretending that our vote offers some kind of representation.

How can 20,000 people, each driven by their own motives, imbue a power hungry arse to speak for them to an even greater power crazed circle, who themselves gave up listening about the same time the votes stopped being counted. This is not a party politics thing – they’re all as fucking bad as each other, they don’t care about your problem or your opinion but they certainly care about their own.

The US system as least acknowledges this and lets you vote directly for the President who may share some of your ideals such as bombing oil rich countries, or screwing the earth beyond the point of reconciliation. At least you know what you’re getting, rather than some pointless stuffed shirt asking anodyne questions about constituents that he cares only slightly less about that the bloke answering in the dispatch box.

They say the young are disenfranchised by politics. Good on them, maybe they see it for what it is.

Anyway, here’s my idea. In the same way that we receive good karma for sponsoring a goat or a cow in a country we once funded with slaves as the most profitable export, why not abolish some taxes and allow us to sponsor public servants? It’d be like The Sims but for real. I’ll sponsor two nurses in the local hospital and they can write me some reports on how many people didn’t die because someone cared about their welfare. I’d feel good, less people may suffer and it won’t cost the government a penny.

You see where this could go? We wouldn’t have to sponsor those public services that everyone accepts are either a total waste of time or a government revenue generator. Traffic Wardens – you can bugger off home for a start. Free Market economics with a social edge, I think it could be a winner.

I mean come on, we cannot really do any worse.