Occupy-Eyed

After a long, dark night of despair and despondency, a New Dawn is breaking here in the lovely country of Northumbria. Or at least, that's what the soothsayers like Beeby See and her pock-marked pals Guardy-Ann and Windy the Pedant are announcing. I'm so excited! What's for lunch?

After the collapse of the Holy Groat, the Great Debt Crisis and the Sacred Cuts to Public Services ushered in a new age of austerity, and in common with the Moors, Vikings, Westphalians, Greeks, Iberians, Franks and every other tribal grouping in the human world, the Anglo-Saxons are getting restless. Or at least, some of them are. Accompanied by their mothers, their pacifiers and formidable supplies of magic mushrooms, the cool and trendy children of the Kingdom are making their protest against the Tree/Liberationist Administration and the Moneylenders, the traders and business people of the Realm. And anything else that makes for a convenient target or scapegoat for their wrath. It's all their fault, doncha know?

This rumble of protest has assumed the shape of concerted action by large groups of unwashed and mucus-encrusted children, who in the fresh flush of infantile naivete have agreed to converge to idly protest on the marketplaces of Yorvik as well as those of the principal settlements in the Kingdoms of Mercia, Sussex and Wessex. Street musicians, mountebanks, jugglers, pickpockets, mead and hot pie salesmen and latrine diggers are also present, hoping to capitalise on these new and spontaneous business opportunities. After all, a little protester has got to eat, drink and defecate, and needs some entertainment to occupy his minuscule attention span. Doubtless, there will also be small-time agents of the Moneylenders among them, chasing up the opportunity to drum up some new investment business; after all, these children are uncannily canny with their financial affairs.

This exciting and new development in the evolving history of the Northumbrian Kingdom does pose some questions, though. While they're all gathered to protest against whatever it is they're annoyed about, who is doing their work? Who is tilling the earth, baking the bread, helping the needy and sick while they're having a whale of a time getting wazzed up and wiped out on mead and magic mushrooms? I can only surmise it must be their long-suffering families..

I wish them the very best. It must be very hard to protest against their own faults... Bless.