TFIF at Fruitcake Minature College

It's the end of the week here at Fruitcake Minature College. The teaching staff have come back from their Friday afternoon therapy and become the Refectory staff just in time to put the kettle on and take a cup up to the roof where the Principal lies asleep at the feet of the Head of Animal Care.

Earlier today we had our second lesson (all perfectly within the terms of the redundancy agreement). Any possible faux pas by Fruitcake with respect to his absent litter tray was forestalled by putting his tray in the garden by the back door. You might ask why a cat can't go outside in any case. Good question, but this is a cat. Anyway, the lesson was civilised and productive. The Finance Department got to do their thing with the new receipt book. And lunch was a calm pasty afterwards. How different, I thought, from Hardacre Collage, a place which only exists as my favourite spelling mistake.

Just as Fruitcake Minature College is a more benign microcosm of Hardacre Collage, so Hardacre Collage is a less than benign microcosm of the UK as currently governed. Hardacre Collage is a disfunctional bureacracy led by people who are huge with self-assurance but tiny in the departments of imagination and direct experience. Somewhat similarly, our wafer-thin Government seem to sees itself as entitled to tell the rest of us what's wrong with society, and would like us to believe that our money's all gone on feckless dole scroungers, and my pension (when actually most of it went into propping up banks or never went into the Exchequer in the first place, tax avoidance by the very rich being all perfectly tickety-boo).

So at the end of the week it's pleasant to relax at Fruitcake Minature College with a cup of Assam tea and think about how different it is from Hardacre Collage. Here I really am doing everything, at the Collage it just felt that way. Here the resources are rather limited and mostly made by the teaching staff ... no, wait a minute. Here at Fruitcake Minature College you are on your own. No, still not working. Ah, like the nation, here we're in a democratic coalition. Not quite, basically I'm just talking to myself. Got it! The big difference is that here senior management is a cat who walks about demanding things we have to guess at and who then goes outside to shout at the other cats. He'll calm right down for a bit of fish. That's the big difference.