The Second Goblin International

Hullo!

Some of the more faithful of the nesthole’s followers may recall a 'Goblin manifesto,’ penned early on in my career. This is merely the result of youthful radical indiscretion. After all, every one of our country’s great liars, I mean leaders, has gone through a period of fiery but immature political thinking; Jack Straw was once a communist leader of the NUS; Peter Hain once took on the police as an anti-apartheid protester; and Tony Blair himself was once member of the Oxford University Dining club. (Blair third from right making the international 'wanker' gesture.) As the great Bob Dylan once said, ‘I was so much younger then, I’m older than that now’, and he must know, what with whoring himself out to Starbucks and I-pod adverts and he is pretty old, is he not?

Anyhow I digress. This, the Second Goblin International, is an improvement and revision of my previous ideas. It reaches you at what I must modestly suppose to be the (hopefully not-too-rapidly waning!) zenith of my illustrious academic career. As we speak, I appear regularly in newspaper columns and cutting edge current affairs programs such as ‘The Daily Politics’ with Andrew Neill, and hashing up tedious whimsical video montages for Newsnight.

What qualifies me to comment on the day to day events of the modern world? It is undoubtedly the unmatched education I received in the white-hot academic environment of one of our oldest universities. I spent many a somnolent afternoon downing 16 bottles of rose wine, braying about Wittgenstein and throwing myself off a certain bridge (you wouldn’t be able to pronounce it, peasants) onto a waiting punt.* My meticulously researched thesis on Mesopotamian pottery shards, for which I was lucky enough to receive a generous scholarship from British Petroleum, provided concrete historical evidence for the essential fanaticism and warlike character of ancient Iranians, which persists as late as today. My latest opus, currently serialised in the Daily Telegraph is a social history of the post Gulf War period called ‘CHAV: My grandfather would have beaten them to death with a swordstick, but I am reduced to calling them ‘pramfaces.’'

Indeed, the new class system of Great Britain is one of the marvels of modern society that I am privileged to observe every time I walk into the Marks and Spencer food hall and find entirely the wrong sort of person there. What I find particularly fascinating and droll is the fact that the people who put the boot in to the lower classes with the most vigour, happen to be the lower classes themselves! Chavs, dole scroungers, pram face- all these terms and more can be found within the pages of the resolutely working class tabloids. It’s almost reminiscent of those heady days when Rupert Murdoch persuaded the scum to vote Mrs. Thatcher in for 11 years! Ha ha ha!

Anyhow, peasants, buy my book. Only I am authorised to tell you what to read, what to listen to, what you are like. Open your mouth wide to swallow my golden shower of academia, and don’t forget to pay me!

Dr. Jennifer Goblin


*It’s Magdalen! Say it peasant! I want to hear your stupid mouth say it in your stupid accent!




Goblin's 'wonderful list.'