The world as we know it has gone all granny scooter

Apr 16 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

WHAT fresh hell is this? Flowers losing their fragrance, Jerusalem being banned from churches and the Bognor Birdmen grounded.

What has happened to the world as we know it, where roses smell as sweet on urban allotments as in the sweeping raised beds of stately homes and we are free to tunelessly bellow patriotic lyrics or leap from the end of a pier in makeshift wings without the establishment intervening?

So now we have to cope with the everyday adversities of life, such as dodging speeding grannies on their mobility scooters, without being able to bury our noses in the nearest bloom, which is like burying your head in the sand but you’re less likely to bump brows with an ostrich.

The scentless flower scandal is due, we are told by “experts”, to traffic fumes and industrial pollutants masking the perfume of city-dwelling plants.

To make matters worse, we will not be able to distract ourselves from the full horror of this situation with the thrill of watching fully-grown adults attempting unaided flight from Bognor Regis pier. That Parliamentary party pooper Health & Safety has banned the famous Birdman contest.

These two pieces of news taken together are almost too much to bear. For what is the purpose of life without the scent of roses and idiosyncratic traditions?

Next they’ll be telling us that biscuits are cakes and cakes are biscuits – and indeed they are. Marks & Spencer won a £3.5m VAT rebate last week, after the Treasury mistakenly classified teacakes as chocolate biscuits.

Meanwhile, in Madrid, they’re all going cuckoo over the idea that one of Spain’s most famous artworks, Goya’s El Coloso, may not have been painted by Goya after all.

Clearly there must be something in the water for so many of the universe’s known “truths” to have been disrupted all at the same time, shaking mankind’s faith in its own experience.

As someone not immediately obvious once said, before lots of other people even less immediately obvious quoted him, there is no such thing as coincidence.

Surely, then, the collision of so many disturbances implies that something in the world has gone offline, like a blip in the time-space continuum or God having a fit of hiccups, depending on your personal beliefs.

What could have caused such a thing? Was it that I actually managed to apply eyeliner last weekend without the finished result resembling a giant slug?

Could it be that my successes in make-up were so contrary to the rules of the cosmos that they set off a chain of events culminating in the shortening of Bognor Pier and the eventual cancellation of the Birdman competition?

Or accepting that, despite my briefly inflated ego, my own actions have no relevance on the universal scheme of things, could it all be down to the hot-rod pensioners?

Maybe their zippy progression along the pavements of Great Britain is not, after all, down to secret attempts to beat the landspeed record, but is actually holding the threads of the universe together.

If this is true, then our problems clearly began when police in Warwick- shire placed a 4mph speed limit on mobility scooters in Rugby town centre after a spate of what they termed “near misses”.

This must have weakened the world’s centrifugal force, allowing the axis of reality to spin wildly out of control.

Within just a few seconds, cakes had turned into biscuits, Goya had unpainted his paintings, Jerusalem became unrecognised as a hymn and flowers had forgotten how to smell.

Meanwhile, the silver speeders returned home to work out whether the universe could be set straight if they bought a lifetime’s supply of chocolate digestives and set the kettle on permanent boil.

The fatal flaw in this argu- ment is that the speed rest- riction was announced last week, but our blooms have been losing their scent for a while.

Something must have interfered with the universe’s centrifugal force at an earlier point in time.

A sudden flashback to being ploughed down by a mobility scooter on Castle Street, one lunchtime a couple of years ago, makes me realise that I wasn’t being egotistical after all.

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk