World Book Day Of The Jackel

I suspect this will go down badly, but chocks away nonetheless.  It's World Book Day.  What's not to like?  I, myself, am something of a bibliophile.  I read constantly, and I do tend to fetishize books I esteem highly.  I have a large collection of the buggers at home to illustrate this fact.  Too many, as it happens.  When in a new town, I always seek out the nearest bookshop, and there I can spend hours, simply flicking through the tomes.  I, I think it fair to say, like books more than the man on the Clapham omnibus.  Unless that man is Melvyn Bragg.  But I take issue with WBD.  Why?  Because it's a classic example of avoidance behaviour.

Parents these days, with their usual manic overreactions to events such as this, go to enormous lengths to dress their wretched progeny up as characters from their favourite books.  But how much reading are these same children doing, both at school and extra-murally?  Surely, that should be purpose of WBD.

I dare say parents and woolly educationalists will point to a nebulous connection that's been teased out by some PhD. student somewhere, suggesting that dressing up as Stig of the Dump increases a child's aggregate career earnings by 25% or something.  Actually, there probably is a correlation, but that's only because the whole thing is so class-driven.  Middle class parents in this country go passive-aggressive bourgeois ape-shit for this stuff.  You can tell they're absolutely frantic that their child will simply not be dressed like the rest of the herd, and also that his or her costume will bespeak an elegant, effortless and forensic intelligence.  This is easier said than done of course, which is why they all have minor stress-induced strokes trying to select and then construct a suitable outfit.

It's at times like this that I wish I had children.  I'd dress the offspring as one of Henry Chinaski's slattern pissed-up girlfriends from "Women" or "Post Office".  This would present the teachers with a problem because Bukowski is a serious artist, so it's a valid choice.  And yet there's a 10-year-old boy in the class who looks like a drunk Bette Middler tribute act.  What would the school do?  Send the child home?  I'd make mince of them in the local paper if they did.  No, he's staying.  What do you mean you haven't read it?  Spent too long dressing-up instead?  I thought as much.