Holiday fun in Trumpton

Next Monday is our National Day here on L'Isle de Homme. Or, more precisely, the day when the triumph of English colonialism over anything vaguely resembling a Manx identity is most crushingly obvious ....to anyone except the loons who perpetuate the Tynwald Day farce.
I’ve already covered the lunacies and delusions of the ceremony itself (see last July’s Tynwald Day for Dummies ) so won’t repeat myself here.
This year, according to the local press (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Looking-ahead-to-Tynwald-Day.6376950.jp ) “organisers have decided to put an emphasis on family fun with a picture treasure hunt and a special question from Tynwald President Noel Cringle MLC.”
Actually, I have a special question in return for Noel.
Why do you bother?
For the benefit of off-island readers, Cringle is what you might get if you crossed Benny from Crossroads with a sheep, then programmed it to parrot the philosophical musings of a particularly vacuous small town Unionist politician. When not laying on Manx whimsy with a trowel as part of his doddery uncle act in Tynwald he’s abusing his privilege (and public resources) to run ‘prayer breakfasts’, at which yet-to-be-convicted war criminals and international fraudsters raise the aspirations of the most dishonest and dull-witted elements of local life (i.e. church leaders, overpaid civil servants and evangelical Christians in general).
As for the nature of the ’family fun’, you can get a taste of that by downloading the Tynwald Day programme at http://www.tynwald.org.im/ . Not, to be honest, the kind of family life to be seen anywhere else on the planet (unless you include, say, a few three-nippled kissing cousins in Alabama).
You can see just how dire it all is by noting that most of the week’s ‘entertainment’ is the Ramsey National Week (see http://www.ramseynationalweek.com/ ), which in turn is underpinning the Manx Flower Festival (see http://www.manxflowerfestival.org/ ), a particularly twee small town church fundraiser.
This isn’t to say families can’t have fun.
For example, you can snoop around all the drabbest or most startling examples of two eejits-and-a-mutt Manx ‘charities’ on the heavily censored fair field ( from which every last example of Manx democracy or independent thinking apart from Mec Vannin/the Manx National Party has now been airbrushed).
Try slipping a copy of, say, Valerie Solanas’s Scum Manifesto into the Mothers Union display of homely tracts, or slip an old Wayne County & the Electric Chairs tape into a blank case and place it next to the tape recorder on the SPUC stall. You’ll be well gone by the time If You Don’t Want To Fuck Me Baby, Baby Fuck Off blasts out at full volume instead of Pat Boone.
Or you can play our family favourite. Walk up to a Flower Festival participant church hand-in-hand in a nice family group, watch the staff salivate……
..and then turn around, run away and do something interesting instead.
Hours of innocent fun to be had – you just have to use your imagination. Which is more than the organisers of these toytown idiotfests ever do.