Fans of shutting down the NHS are often visited in their sleep by troubling visions of old and infirm people dying in the streets, but I’ve found the perfect antidote!

“About 75 white pupils walked out of the Central High School here after eight Negroes went in to-day, and one boy hung a straw effigy of a Negro from a tree.”

That was 1957. The hate mongering 30-somethings operating on that day are now feeble old octogenarians. And guess what? The rest of the slimy bunch that handed us young’uns this peculiar smelling crazy world are old age pensioners too now. Unaided old age seems a fitting punishment for the generation that failed to fix the world and handed the problem onto their own children.

Counterpoint

It could also be said that the only people who had the power to fix the world used it to become super-rich and are now living it up in retirement castles, leaving the dispossessed to take the blame from ignorant upstarts like myself, and grow old in poverty.

I lean towards the former point, since even being alive in the 1940s and 50s must make you culpable via some kind of osmosis of responsibility.

Dear child-of-2050: feel free to let me and my generation fend off the radioactive zombie-rottweilers on our own, if we haven’t fixed the world before handing over the keys.

The Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester is pretty nice. It’s a theatre - as in, a real live people-on-the-stage theatre - built inside the old stock exchange building. I went there last week.

First a word about the prices. It’s around 20 pounds for a ticket, more for better seats, less for worse. However! If you’re a student, it’s only 3.50! Wow! I can only assume there’s some kind of middle-class rip-off going on.

Anyway, I went to see A Kestrel for a Knave. It was good - very good considering I was expecting a horrific Legs Akimbo style mess. The League of Gentlemen has undoubtedly done the most damage to the public perception of theatre since English GCSEs.

I totally recommend going at least once, but if your budget doesn’t include that last 50p, you can see Hero at the AMC for 3 pounds, which is actually a lot better and just goes to show what you can do for 30,000 times the budget.