By Geckeg Zait

There are times to hope and times to dream. There are times of joy and times of pain.

This was a time to duck.

Only in the aftermath of Sooty’s savage pizza assault on septuagenarian star Paul Daniels can we begin to survey what this might mean for us as human beings – and what it tells us about the yellow furry puppet bears we have for too long welcomed in our midst.

We are all Paul Daniels now.

And yet where are the voices of the media right at this hour of enlightened reflection? For too long we have endured their shrill, banshee-like written excess. An excess born of disgust of the other.

A disgust of the different.

But when something other – the representative of a division of creatures who have warned us before that were we to venture into the woods we’d be ‘in for a big surprise’ – reveals itself in a crazed act of repugnant terror, their commentary finds no outlet. Their quills drip no ink. No poison is spilt.

Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Now the baton of impotent outrage has been dropped, it is up to us to pick up that baton, engorge it with the Viagra of truth and justice, and hoist it up erect with the cry ‘death to the puppets!’

For we know Sooty – he’s lived among us.

His silence speaks volumes.

What boy hasn’t been deviantly attracted to an altogether unsavoury application of the puppet hole in bed, alone, at night? What girl – sweet, innocent – hasn’t been lured into the senseless parade of Soo’s lustful yearnings for a bear who cares only for the subjugation of those who have animated him?

We don’t know.

But what we do know is there’s another month of this before the Commons sits again and the journalists come back from the Amalfi Coast.

Let’s hope we have some answers by then.

This article was not first published in Le Monde Diplomatique.

This story was deemed true enough when going to press.