Chapter 27 In which we reflect on what has happened in one month in Westphalia-on-Sea

At this point in the saga some of the people in Westphalia-on-Sea began to take stock of what had been happening in their little town. Just four weeks earlier the first five chapters of the fledgling Piddlebackside blog had been pushed out of the nest and left to fend for themselves on the internet. The political musings of person or persons unknown, at a time when people were becoming increasingly disillusioned with the political process, they were surely not going to interest anyone; Allen Salkin, writing in the New York Times, said 'many blogs have a readership of one, -or at best, the writer, his mother and some guy from grade school who found him on Google'. It was even more bizarre then, that the Piddlebackside blog should buck the trend and develop a relatively large readership in a very short space of time, be featured on local radio and discussed by Members of Parliament. When commentators examined the reasons for its success they found that it appealed to a wide cross-section of society who all had two things in common. Firstly, they all hated their elected leader squandering huge amounts of their hard-earned cash on consultants when the answers to most questions were staring everyone in the face, and secondly, they were utterly fed up with the stream of drivel about grandiose schemes for future prosperity to which they were constantly subjected. It seemed that the people coming up with ideas such as high-speed ferries, brand name changes and turning towns into cities were on a different planet, and as time went on some of the Westphalians began to speculate about which planet it might be. It will probably come as no surprise to many readers to hear that the conclusion reached by most of these amateur astronomers was that this kind of talk could only come from Uranus.

Like any new TV show, film or book, the blog had its fans, but it also had its detractors. These were mainly the people who were deeply involved in peddling the fanciful stories about future prosperity, and selling off bits of Westphalia-on-Sea's beautiful coastline to developers. These were people like the mayor, Dr Pangloss, the Deputy Mayor, Ahmad Hatter, and Charlie Windsor, the Mayor's staunch ally, his campaign manager, and prospective MP. Since it would bore readers to keep reading this list of names we can use a more convenient 'umbrella term' and call them 'the Conservatives', and that way we can include all the people who thought the same way as those three. Now, before any accusations of political bias are made, at this point it should be remembered that all political parties have eye-wateringly stupid ideas from time to time. However, on the Cote de Westphalia it was this group which had an impressive history of repeatedly hiring expensive firms of consultants and then applauding every hare-brained scheme which was presented by them.

So it was then that some of these Conservatives said whoever's writing this blog 'is far too up himself', he's 'arrogant' and 'too clever by half', and that Piddlebackside was a 'little imaginary world'. Of course what they obviously hadn't realised was the reason the blog was so popular was not because Piddlebackside was a little imaginary world, but because it held a mirror up to the real world of Westphalia-on-Sea. From their comments it was also clear that the other thing that Conservatives didn't like was 'clever', especially when it came in quantities 50% bigger than normal. No, they didn't seem to like 'clever', or people that read books and thought for themselves, or people that applied simple logic to everyday life, or people that could string two words together and seemed to know what they were talking about. Conservatives were people who believed they lived in the best of all possible worlds, and if this required an unquestioning belief in all sorts of claptrap, then so be it. In fact in this respect they were not at all unlike the Queen in Through the Looking Glass. In that volume Alice points out that one can't believe impossible things, to which the Queen replies: "I daresay you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Claptrap, as intelligent readers are no doubt aware, can come in many forms: it could be the idea that there are thousands of wealthy visitors waiting to come to Westphalia-on-Sea if only the town had another casino, and fewer pensioners, chavs and young farmers. It could be something as simple as changing the name of a town, or it could be the complicated business of turning a town into a city. Now as most of this kind of claptrap was helpfully reported in the Westphalia Express, Westphalians had plenty of practice in believing it, but unlike the Queen in Carroll's masterpiece it seemed as though they were becoming increasingly unwilling to do so. Indeed, some Westphalians began to sense that there was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air.