Well, that's not right, surely

Honour...

It's a very dated word for an idea that seems to have become equally dated. I can guarantee most of you had a picture of a knight in armour flash into your head when you read it (Unless of course you have experienced our justice system, where you might have thought of a judge)

Hold on tight kids, I'm going in for the definition:

Definition of honour

noun

[mass noun]

• high respect; great esteem:his portrait hangs in the place of honour [in singular]
• a person or thing that brings esteem:you are an honour to our profession (His, Your, etc. Honour) a title of respect or form of address given to a circuit judge, a US mayor, and (in Irish or rustic speech) any person of rank.
• the quality of knowing and doing what is morally right:I must as a matter of honour avoid any taint of dishonesty
• dated a woman’s chastity or her reputation for being chaste:she died defending her honour

 
I'm mainly talking about the third one in the list, The quality of knowing and doing what is morally right. It's easy enough you'd think - You picture a situation that requires a choice, you decide (because it's usually obvious) what the 'right' thing to do is, and do it...

Simples! As an animatronic/CGI meerkat might say, before being replaced by a dry, scenery chewing, comedian whose character supposedly has a special set of angry clothing.

Not difficult is it? Really? You make the right choice, it gives you a warm feeling inside, you can be forgiven for having a bit of a smug little grin to yourself and the world keeps spinning round the sun like it has for the past however many billion years.

But now let's do some role-playing... Imagine for a second that you're a scrote.

(Some of you will find that easier than others obviously)

And we're gonna need a situation from someone in the audience... What's that sir? Waiting in the rain for a bus with a one-legged German and an Irishman? No, that doesn't really fit our purposes, Someone buying a live duck as a present for a Latvian single mother? - Seriously? What are you people on?

Forget it, I'll make something up. Howabout, you're walking down the street behind a pensioner, she gets a real-live handkerchief out of her pocket, because they're the only people who still use them, and blows her nose. At the same time, she drops a fiver... No, no.. she drops a twenty pound note... What do you do?

Well you steal it, obviously don't you, there's no-one watching (You did remember we were roleplaying being a scrote, right?) You make it so she has to fight the cat for its food for the next week until she gets her pittance of a pension so that you can buy another thirty cans of Dreadnought lager from Mr Patel in the corner shop, who you should really hate, 'cos he's ethnic, but he's very chatty and always asks if your Mum's alright when you go in to buy Rizlas.

And the world STILL keeps spinning round the sun like it has for the past however many billion years.

Can you see where this is going? It seems to me that doing the right thing should the default setting, It's what my Dad taught me to do, it's what I teach my kids to do. But, being a dishonourable scrote is the way to make easy money, you can see why it's on the rise.

A case in point was the news story I heard on the radio on the way to work this morning. It seems a group of 'men' are wandering around the homes of the aged and infirm in the West Midlands claiming to be council appointed rat-catchers who need to check your house for.. erm.. well.. rats. They gain entry, open their toolboxes, which contain previously killed rats (in a 'here's one I hit with a hammer earlier' stylee) and declare that you've got an infestation. Then they charge you for getting rid of it.

They charged one little old lady twenty-four thousand pounds...

I'll say that again so you can ponder the enormity of it...

TWENTY... FOUR... THOUSAND... POUNDS...

I mean, there must be some overheads, buying overalls and rat poison and so forth can't be cheap, but... That's obscene - Seemingly this has been going on for a while, but the 'going rate' for disposing of completely fictional, non-existant rats was about £400-£500 up until recently, and no-one particularly minded.

How much front does it actually take a pensioner's life savings? Would you have the brass neck to stand there whilst she thanks you for doing it?

No? Excellent! Well done - You are a well evolved human being and can commence telling people how brilliant you are - Go ahead, turn to the person next to you and tell them just how gecko-bleachingly wonderful you are.

But what if you answered yes? Well, I mean you wouldn't - No-one who reads this Blog could do that to another human being.

Could they?

You're all brilliant and kind and honourable. You do what's right because it's right, not for the reward, not because it's what people expect of you, but because it's what you expect of yourself, it's what makes you a valued member of society.

But you know... In the roleplay, it was only, like, £20... And I could do with a bit of a 'buffer' where the old petrol budget is concerned.

I mean, if I'd just found it lying in the street and there was nobody about, I wouldn't think twice would I?

Is there any difference? Should I really take it to the Police?

I probably should...

But I probably won't...

And I'd say that most of the rest of you wouldn't either...

Damn! We're all scrotes!

You know that person that you turned to a couple of minutes ago and told that you were great? - See what they think of you now...

I, personally, am very disappointed in us all.

T-wit - who?

Did you know, that it's physically impossible to move your hands wide enough apart to indicate how awesome owls are? Give it a go now - spread your hands apart as wide as you can... Is that it? No, sorry, owls are significantly more awesome than that. Probably twice as much.

They're like Birds of Prey V2.0 - I mean, your average Eagle, marvellous bird, don't get me wrong, can pick up a sheep and carry it back to the nest and feed it to its young, you don't get blackbirds doing that do you? But an owl, any old owl (with the possible exception of those tiny ones that live in holes in the ground) could do all that... Only silently - It could do it before the sheep / lizard / haddock had even woken up. One second the prey's having a lovely dream about grass or tapioca or something , the next it's torn up into chunks and being swallowed by something that looks a little bit like a transvestite zombie ET.

Weird thing that, owls are one of the few things in the animal kingdom that have ugly babies, I mean, I like owls... A lot, but you happen upon a nest of owlets when you're out for a stroll in the countryside and the whole 'Kill it with fire' instinct kicks in - They also smell incredibly bad and make a noise not unlike Satan with his Man-danglies caught in a revolving door.

We used to have a resident owl at Dandy Towers, there are photos of him on my Facebook page for my stalkers to take a look at. His name was Twist and he was frighteningly bi-polar. Incredible bird though, beautiful plumage. A European Barn Owl, who would sit, imperiously in the corner of the kitchen like a judgemental biscuit tin, watching you with his cold, dead, sharks eyes - right up until the point where he deemed you below his contempt and closed them. Ever been ignored by an owl? it does nothing for your self esteem.

This is the Owl in question, sat on the Mini-Dandy's head, some years ago

Owls are not the perfect indoor pet, they eject their waste from both ends with unpleasant speed, accuracy and regularity. They seem to void the bodily fluids of their food seperate to everything else and that is not a sight, or smell that you quickly get used to. But if you persevere, they can become merely incredibly troublesome rather than a right-royal pain in the rear.

They're nice to take out for a walk though, they'll sit on your shoulder quite happily, or more likely on your head - And you'll get a lot of attention. In fact, I once got stopped by a couple of WPCs when I was out with the owl and one of the rottweillers - Once all the coo-ing and the aww-ing had died down (It helped that the Rottie was particularly cute too) one of the uniforms turned to me and said,

'I bet you don't get mugged very often'

The owl took this as her cue to flap the short distance from my shoulder to my head, and relieve herself down the back of my neck. This did not do wonders for my already limited appeal to the opposite sex and they quickly continued on their patrol avec le grande vitesse.

If you Google the word 'Owls', pretty much every picture of a real owl that appears has an implied tag of 'Owl thinks: I will kick your ass'; and the ones that don't, look as if they suffer with some fairly severe mental retardation, this does nothing to assuage their general air of ass-kickery as they can now be filed under psychotic predators with inch long claws and no remorse.

They can do unnatural stuff too - Everyone and their rabbit knows about the whole head spinning 'round like Linda Blair watching speedway, but did you know that most of them can turn their heads upside-down too? Some of them can make one of their front toes point backwards to create inescapable double talons of tearing - Although they're not all conquering instruments of death of course, otherwise we'd all be speaking owlese and living in holes in trees - They've been given a couple of disabilities just to keep them in their place - They have no peripheral vision and their ears aren't on straight.

Despite all this, I would have one again quicker than you can stir fry a possum, this time I might have something a little bigger, maybe a Great Grey or an Eagle (Owl) - Something I could fit a saddle on, or at least have a half-suit of armour made for.

I'd call him Trevor