Uncle Danny’s Warzone.

As you might have guessed by now, I am not a great fan of Cousin Laura. I find her to be a dreary, chirpy, high-handed, moralizing, demeaning pain in the arse who seems to live to spout mushheaded pieties about farm life and to insult her city relatives because they have the luxury of not getting up at an insane hour to work hours on end in what I can only see as enforced privation. About the only reason why she isn’t the most annoying character on Exile Farm is that she’s Daddy’s Little Hayseed. Just as Eva Warzone’s infuriating habit of simpering about how privileged someone whose living space is smaller than her shoe closet is is most likely owing to witlessly parroting the mush her parents spew non-stop, Laura is little more than a ventriloquist’s dummy for her father.

Let us mark time on the fact that much like Anthony Caine, John and Elly regard Danny as being a great old fellow as well as a fountain of timeless wisdom. Let us also remember that to someone who doesn’t have his head wedged up his sigmoid colon, Danny can be described by phrases like “Beardo The Weirdo”, “the pub bore” and “that pontificating road apple pretending that it’s nineteen-aught-five”. The man seems never to have found a pompous and poorly thought-out piety about the simple life his simple mind didn’t like and more than likely hammered it into his child’s skull that not only did she have to pull her weight around the farm every freaking day, she should be grateful that she hasn’t been corrupted by such horrors as waking up after sunrise, time to herself, a ride to school that doesn’t take an hour on a steaming-hot bus, easy access to shopping and other amenities and all of the other things that people who aren’t living on a pig farm run by a jackass who substituted a dog-eared copy of the Whole Earth Catalogue for Scripture take for granted.

The reason that I can say this with some confidence is that when Lynn needed a voice to bitch at her kids for getting grabby, it came from lips hidden behind a ridiculous looking beard. This, Lynn, John and Elly think is timeless wisdom coming from a secular saint. You probably can guess what I think he’s saying.