I’m almost tempted to get knocked up and go home!  No, really!  (rusty tubes permitting, obviously), such is the idyllic view of future Blighty currently being painted by the government during their party conference in Birmingham.  What a beautiful place it’s going to be and a cracking future for kids.  No?

At the weekend, The Telegraph published one hundred great things in a hundred minutes, to celebrate one hundred days since the referendum (or something like that).   And THANK GOD THEY DID, otherwise how would we have known, amongst other things, that Brexit Britain means cheap tennis balls, less EU X-Factor, proper weedkiller and old-fashioned light bulbs.  All the yays!  In fact, it was my light bulb moment – pun intended.  Who cares that the newly reinstated anti-EU, old-fashioned light bulb of my mind was burning into the environment and costing a fortune.  Whatevs.  The important issue was, could I beat the clock, speed home and knock a couple out – so that the nippers could grow up in this Utopian dream, could I?  I was on the brink of regretting not having them, and then the Conservative Party Conference started.  BOOM!  That was it.

The cogs of plan making started whirring into action.  With the various speeches from various cabinet ministers, layering image upon image of blissful Britain, with the deft skill of Turner, I was seeing my newly liberated country in a completely different light.  There was talk of a jam shortage in France and a desperate need for the UK to step up to the plate, and deliver our Gallic cousins from their sticky situation, or lack thereof.  And well, we all know that jam has sustained economies for like gazillions of centuries.  But of course, brilliant!  I can make jam.  It couldn’t be such a massive step from destroying my kitchen and using every utensil and pan in the place to produce two jars, to say, exporting five hundred thousand jars annually to a land of croissant eaters unfulfilled by their own Bonne Maman, right?  And according to the Telegraph piece, another great thing will be non-regulated ports, so like it will totally allow our pirates to maraud all the jam to France and sink all the ships coming our way with continental crap equivalents, with cannon balls and stuff.

Then there was something truly inspirational from Andrea ‘I’m a mother’ Leadsom.  Get our kids to pick the fruit!  Yes!  *fist pump.  As a mother, she knows best and I trust her advice, and I am absolutely sure that she’ll be sending hers out to the orchards and strawberry fields some time soon.  If it’s good enough for hers, it’ll be good enough for my future brood too.   It’s all starting to slot in to place.  It’s all so post-war WI, isn’t it?  But I suppose that that Great Blitz spirit is going to come in super handy in the next few years.  So, tally ho!  Who needs school or university anyway?  And they might not even make it into the grammar schools to get a leg up, so sending our kids out to do manual labour is logical.  Duh.  We are also sending beautiful British air to foreign lands, because their air is shit.  They need our air.  We have loads of pig semen, so that’s pretty aces; and it’s good to know that I and my children, won’t be forced into retirement in our twilight years that we don’t even want.  So, the plan is this:

I go home
get myself a small holding
plant fruit, have pigs, make sure there’s a good supply of air
pop a couple out
work ’em out in the fields as soon as they can say ‘apple’
we all die doing back-breaking work in our sixties and seventies -But you know what, we’re all going to die happy, and proud, and BRITISH
et voila!  (Oh wait, is that expression banned?)

I can almost hear the swish of my hessian petticoats on the straw covered floor in my modest hut in the midst of this nineteenth century landscape painting.  It’s only a matter of time before Brexiteers tell Brits not to worry about the possible impending travel visas, and cite stay-at-home peasant fun – say like wrestling, shin-kicking and cock-fighting – as a viable alternative to travelling to broaden your horizons. Extreme staycationing.

And what I’m ultimately hoping for in the remaining days of the conference, is that the Tories will announce their plans to invest in the humanities to reinvigorate the lost art of the travelling musician and new apprenticeship schemes for trainee bear-baiters.  Primarily, to give my offspring at least a little choice; maybe they’ll be predisposed luvvies and really not into getting their hands dirty.  But also when, if we’re really lucky and get to keep some of the jam to put on our bread and in our gruel during a break from tending the land for sixteen hours, and we’re nursing our bruised and bloodied lower legs – we can at least say we saw a bloody good show…….