Children are the future?

by Pseud O'Nym

W.C. Fields famously said, “I like children, but I couldn’t eat a whole one.” But then he hadn’t met any explorers with tales of cannibals who eat human flesh. Had he done so they could’ve told him that human flesh when cooked tastes rather like chicken. Meaning that his misanthropic aphorism could’ve been fleshed out by adding “But if I were to add a nice sauce to them, I could easily manage one or two, depending on the size of them that is.”

I’m not suggesting that you should eat children to your diet, well not in the foreseeable future anyway. But given the chronic overpopulation of the world coupled with calls to reduce the growing agricultural pressures presented by a reliance on eating meat, our future may not be as foreseeable as we might think. Eating children presents us with a rather neat and elegant solution to this problem. Of course there will be moral and ethical issues to be worked through, but why is it that we quite happily eat some animals and not others?

These bred to be fed babies wouldn’t be normal human births, I’m not a monster, I’m not suggesting that babies be whisked out of the delivery room to be cooked whilst their mothers do whatever mothers would do if confronted with that situation. No, to do that would require a brutally extreme society based on ‘The Handmaids Tale’. Instead we could grow them in labs, we are nearly there with the science, so therefore wouldn’t eating babies be ecologically friendly, indeed the key to the survival of humankind?

The sentiments expressed above are in no way whatsoever related to what is happening at my house later this afternoon and only a demented wrongcock of the first order would suggest such a thing. Because this afternoon my house is going to undergo a visitation of vermin or, as other people might put it, hosting a children’s birthday party. But then I am a demented wrongcock, and never having much cared for other children – even when I was one – have selfishly decided to absent myself from the proceedings. I mean I adore the child who’s birthday it is but as I said to her a while ago “I’ve only got so much like in me so do you want me to share all of my like with other children and you or do you want to have it all to yourself?” No prizes for guessing what the answer was.

Instead I’m going off this afternoon to see a film, something that feels somewhat illicit, something naughty, because there are some things one never did, and going to a cinema in the afternoon was one of those things. This feeling of impropriety could’ve been compounded by the fact that cinema chain is in the middle of a dispute with its workers over pay and union recognition. This dispute has been going on for so long that I haven’t seen films there for nearly two years. I’ve visited other cinema’s but the quality of their disabled access is inversely proportionate to their distance from my house.

My needs are substantial and this afternoon I’ll have a substantial need to be out of this house and watching ‘The Favourite’ and being ever so solicitous of my own needs, that is precisely what I’ll be doing.

Unless they decide upon entertainment like this…