Ok, I've been thinking about this one for a while, and it's slowly building up to the point where a decent rant is necessary. Maybe it's brought about by the fact I live in Manchester, so I get to witness the problems more often than not, I don't know.

   But I do know one thing - people on the streets are dangerous at the best of times, and when it rains, they feel like they have some special dispensation to allow them to bring out vicious weapons too. I'm not talking about knives and guns - nothing so tame - these are weapons with the power to remove an eye without any trouble at all. There were invented by a psychotic, and the best thing of all is that they're legal. Pretty much everyone has one. But they only come out as the clouds roll over the sky, when people say "looks like it'll rain", and the weather forecasters on TV tell us it's going to be a hot day in the high 90s.

   Yes, I'm talking about the umbrella. The ultimate weapon in a crowd. Better than a baton round at 20 paces. The ones with metal spokes are Gods gift to facial plastic surgeons everywhere (I think they're called maxillofacial surgeons, but I'd hate to look like an idiot and say that only to be proved wrong) There are designs of land-mine that have done less harm to less people than umbrellas have.

   What really gets me though is that everyone uses them, and uses them most of the time (well, in Manchester anyway) - so why can't they use them safely? They always seem to forget that with an umbrella over their heads, they're suddenly three times as wide, and those fucking little spikes are right at eye level for a lanky git like me - anyone under about 5 foot 6 suddenly becames a potential assailant - the number of cuts and mini-stabs I get on a good rainy day numbers in the tens, at least. My neck can end up looking like Sweeney Todd's been having a practice run on me - I wonder if he invented them, to get people used to having razor sharp metal near their faces? No, that'd be a silly theory.

   And how the hell do these people learn how to use umbrellas in the first place? Which complete utter tosser ever thought that they'd be a good idea? But why aren't people taught how to use them in schools - you know, considerate use of an umbrella - it should be part of the social skills curriculum in every school, the way the cycling proficiency test used to be.

   So here's my proposal - we should campaign for a European Driving Licence for Umbrellas. They've got the ECDL course for Computers (and the concept of a Computer Driving Licence is still one that makes me piss myself, for some unknown reason), the standard Driving License for cars, so why not have one for Umbrellas. First of all, maybe there should be a groundswell movement, just victims of brolly abuse taking the offending item and snapping it's spokes. Get the health and safety people to do an assessment on how dangerous these things really are.

   Then we go for the more hardcore stuff, making people realise how dangerous they really are. Perhaps an assasination a la that russian guy (bulgarian, whatever). Ricin on the tip of the brollie. (Hey, I haven't even mentioned the damage that spiky bit can do - Damn, I must be slacking off in my old age) Remind people how the Aum cult in Japan tried releasing sarin into the subway system by piercing the bags of Sarin with Brollie tips.
("By 7:45 a.m., each member of the hit squad sat in his designated train, clutching a cheap umbrella and a package of sarin wrapped in newspaper. A few stops from Kasumigaseki, the cultists laid their bags on the car floors and punctured them with the umbrella tips. Then, as the car doors opened, they darted into crowds and out of the station, where getaway cars waited.") - quoted from this story in wired

   The other way to do it would be to simply attack the PM with an umbrella. Considering the UK governments knee-jerk reaction of banning whatever it suddenly finds is the scary thing of the day/week/month, that's not a bad idea. I wonder how much trouble I could get in for thinking about battering the grinning twat with an upened umbrella? Particularly if it were windy - the excuse "sorry, it's windy, I just couldn't control it" seems to be perceived as a valid one by every other tosser who's ever belted me full in the face while it's raining and windy, so I don't see why I shouldn't get away with it...

   I think I need to think some more about this. In the meantime, any other ideas, email me at this address and let me know...