I had a total disaster the other morning, says Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail. Having lured my teenage son from his hormonal pit (“using a pain au chocolat as bait”), stuffed him into his suit, and driven him to school through horrendous traffic, I got a call from him three minutes later. School’s been cancelled, he said. The teachers were on strike, again. Apparently, there was an email I had missed. “How remiss of me.” After all, “it’s not like I have anything else to do apart from waiting to be told which of the many groups paid to provide the gold-standard services (ha!) my taxes help to fund has decided to take the sodding day off”.
Anyway, it gave me an idea. Since the rest of the country is doing it, why shouldn’t mums go on strike too? Doctors are calling for a 30% pay rise, but mums would settle for 1%, “because even that’s more than the big fat zero we’re used to”. I can already picture the chants at the picket line: “What do we want?” “A lie-in!” “When do we want it?” “Umm, before we die?” But alas, there’s no mums’ union, “which is probably just as well, because if mums ever did go on strike, it would be Armageddon by teatime”. So mothers plod on, “and while everyone else is busy waving their placards and looking after their own interests, we’ll still be here, looking after everyone else’s”.