MINISTRY OF CULTURE

#11 SPRING

Jesus! Another month, another column. Life is shite, then you die and THEN you get all wormy and stinky. Ho, and indeed hum. But, hey, let’s not get all grumpy-arsed and hopeless. SPRING IS HERE!

Spring, as you know, is the greatest season of the year. And perhaps it is also the best. When Pythagorus nimbly divided the year up into five seasons, he got all flappy and carried away with SPRING. Making it the time of year when flowers erupt and vital hormonal secretions rise to the surface life polystyrene through molasses.

But who are we to argue with the great PI in the sky? No-one, that's who. Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn, as timeless as Emerson Lake and Palmer. Only with a smaller tourbus. If you are American, and chances are if you're reading this, you are, you will not understand the word Autumn. In 1704, President Lincoln outlawed the use of the word, preferring THE FALL, in anticipation of one of the worlds greatest angular, Mancunian agit pop bands. A fine decision, especially when one stops to consider that he hadn't even been born.

Compare it with WINTER. Winter is shit. With it’s facile, hypocritical, Christian festivals and maudlin, minimalist pretensions; all of which peak in a hopeless fury of darkness and cold. No, kids, Winter is our enemy. Winter will come home one night before you and wait for you with a house brick in a sock, kill you, fuck you and eat you.

"This year," we tell ourselves in January, "it will all be different." But that’s January, which is in WINTER. The most Satanic, callous, conceited season of the year. And yet strangely, in January, life IS different. Only not in the way you had hoped. The difference is you’re older. And running for the number 29 to Trafalgar Square is not the carefree prance it once was. More of a slow and painful scrape along the pavement, and a juddering flump into the spiny bus seat.

But let us relax and take comfort in the fact that it is March, and the time has come for us to enjoy Spring’s idiot mincing.

"Ooh-lala!" you simper as the bus smiles up the street at you, winking cheekily as you leap into its flabby arms. "Let’s go to Trafalgar!" you scream. "Huzzah" say the all passengers.

Because Spring is a time for fresh beginnings. Those scrawny weeds you ripped from your garden with undue haste in the Autumn would have been fancy great flowers right about now; probing the crisp air above the ground like a curious, yet carefree lethargy.

But most important of all Spring is the time for all us animals to walk around with dirty-great big hard-ons. Coorrrrrrrrr! Blimey. Let's all stop to consider the prospect of summery clothing and carefree flirting with members of the opposite sex who just two weeks ago were UGLY.

Make the most of it spunk-monkeys, the heat of summer will sap your strength like kryptonite.

Read the fake April Fool's column by John Hansen