Charles on… anything that comes along

So today I’ve been a good citizen. That is, a really disruptive internet break-the-mould stick-it-to-the-man citizen.

Started off being a citizen chauffeur. (OK, driving the family about. But you know, that’s doing a specialist job. Though why is it that if you stick “celebrity” in front of something, people don’t assume you’re the celebrity? If you called yourself a “celebrity chauffeur” people would assume you drove celebs about, not that you were famous and liked ferrying.)

Then moved on to being a citizen childminder. Well, actually, they were just my kids, so “childminder” might have been sort of overstating it a bit, since I didn’t get paid, and didn’t take any exams - but hey, not taking exams is the whole idea about being a “citizen something”. It’s about how you don’t do it.

Then I did a bit of work as a citizen electrician. Yeahhhh, really sticking it to The Man there. Rather than getting an electrician to come in and fix our light switch, I bought one, replaced the old one - having, yeah, switched off the electricity in that part of the house - and put it in. Lights work! Yeah! Come on! Citizen electricianery.. er, electriciany.. electricianing.. anyway, doing it yourself is the wave of the future! Come on, who wants their home wired? Well, I can do the light switches.

Then I did some citizen interior decorating. Yeah, we had a curtain pole that had to be put up. You know, there are people who would charge you good money for that sort of thing. They call themselves “decorators”. Come on - you know that the internet has empowered us to go to exactly the same stores that they do to buy our supplies and Change The World. So - me, a curtain pole, a couple of rawlplugs, a cross-head screwdriver. Oh, damn, a pencil. Down tools. Got the pencil! Oh, damn, a hammer. Down tools. Right! Set. Oh, damn, the rawlplug’s pulled out. Drill drill. It feels so good to be changing the world. If only the flipping holes in the poles would line themselves up. Trust me though - it’s the wave of the future. Soon we’ll all do our interior decoration. It’s going to change completely, baby. Skills in our hands.

So, with that done, and the curtain pole mostly level, it was time to do some citizen gardening. Well, mowing. But you know, that was damn good mowing. If hot.

And that’s not mentioning the citizen paddlingpoolcleaning, citizen chef-ery and citizen just plain reading that I’ve done today. I tell you, being a revolutionary is pretty hard.

Though I think I’ll leave it to others to do the citizen medicine, or citizen architecture, or even citizen policing. Some things, I guess, you need a little training for. I mean, I wouldn’t want to hear that the person trying to reset my broken leg learnt all her expertise from watching ER and House. Hell, I’d do it myself if I thought that approach would ever work.

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