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I do apologise. I was not with you on Monday because I had a family history to complete for a customer as a birthday present: this presented a deadline that could not be missed, and what with relentless child care duties I’m afraid rants stayed unranted.

Which is a shame, really, because the unrelenting shittiness of the lives we are asked to lead does mean that people like me ought to be publicly funded to rant: we fulfil a valuable safety-valve service, a useful outlet, a sort of nationwide scream of “for crying out loud!” when everybody else is too busy beating their bruised foreheads against brick walls to give voice to their furies.

My 86-year-old father went for a test at the NHS’s Plymouth gulag a few weeks ago, following a hospital stay. They stripped him, shoved a pipe up his bony old arse, blew him up with air using something like a stirrup pump, conducted their tests and then stood him in the corner of a shower, like a dog, to hose the shit off him.

My father, being of the grateful generation that fought for and saw the best in everybody, said “Oh, they are marvellous, the staff, made me a cup of tea and everything.”

Anyway, do you think anybody’s bothered to let him know the results? Have they hell. They leave an 86-year-old man to wonder his remaining days away. “Is there something wrong with me? Is this The End?” Don’t look to our NHS for an answer, Dad.

Apparently, if there’s something major they’ll get in touch – so he jumps, literally, every time the phone rings. If they don’t call, he can ring his health centre and ask if the gulag has bothered to let his GP know the outcome yet.

The middle ground? For example, an ongoing condition that could be eased earlier if the results were known quickly? Well, that’s no concern to anybody but my father, and he’s not a pharmaceutical corporation or a consultant with a health industry freebie and a golf appointment or an MP with a seat on the board of a private medical concern and he’ll be dead soon so there’s not much profit left in him so fuck him. Let him wait. Let him wonder. Let him worry.

Yesterday, the postman couldn’t push a DVD through our letterbox and left one of those ‘sorry you were out’ Royal Mail cards. This happens quite regularly, and is not a problem. The cards always say you have to wait 24 hours before collecting your parcel but I’ve always been able to ring our excellent local office, check the parcel’s arrived back, and go and collect it the same day.

As this parcel was for my seven-year-old and was something to which he’d been looking forward, I was happy to do the same again. I picked up the phone to dial the newly-privatised Royal Mail.

You’re ahead of me, aren’t you?

A call centre. An announcement that callers can no longer under any circumstances be permitted to speak to their local postal staff. A confirmation that people like me who said privatisation would result in an immediate fall in the standard of service were, of course, right.

What’s wrong with staff speaking to people? Ah, that would be a job, wouldn’t it, for somebody who has to be paid, and somebody might sit around for ages  not speaking on the phone and then we’d be paying him for nothing and that might hurt our profits, our lovely lovely profits that are all we live for and care about and you say us being able to speak to a customer may have helped a seven-year-old boy full of hope and dreams and belief in goodness? A seven-year-old? Has he money? Can he make us money? No? Then fuck him. And fuck you, sir.

I went to the local office anyway and the decent staff handed over the parcel with an expression of such utter, total contempt for their employers that I felt cheered up for a moment.

Then the children and I went to an open evening at our local secondary school for kids of the age of my eldest, nine, and upwards. What a lovely evening. Wonderful enthusiastic teaching staff inspiring interest, excitement and involvement in their young visitors. We all really enjoyed it. Well, the boys and I did – their mother’s a teacher after all and so, it being seven in the evening, she was still working.

A survey today shows teachers in this country work longer hours than teachers in any other developed country. Yet less of that time is spent teaching than in any other country. What a proud achievement.

What always strikes me is the incongruity of our education system. Our children are taught about kindness, decency, fairness, equality, tolerance, sharing, caring. By teachers who are treated like whipped curs – insulted by politicians, overworked by bureaucrats, judged by the quite appallingly laughable ‘Sir’ Michael Wilshaw and his useless Ofsted team. By teachers who work for an education system staffed by politicians to whom the universal values we teach our children are just negotiable assets to be debated for reasons of self-interest. So the children can enter a world in which vital public services refuse to speak to their customers, so they can enter a world in which their health is of little concern to the organisation that’s supposed to be responsible for it, so they can pay enormous bills to prop up a system that treats them with contempt.

And now Rebekah Brooks is innocent. And that being the case, I await news of the inquiry into how it could possibly be that somebody who knew absolutely nothing about anything that was going on around her, yet shared responsibility for the conduct of her journalists, was ever allowed anywhere near editorial power…

In declaring her innocence, the jury at her trial can only have concluded she knew so little of what was going on in her workplace that she was incapable of so much as running a fucking tap.

And away she walks with millions and millions of Murdoch’s dirty pounds filling her pockets, to party with Jeremy Clarkson. Well I for one would sooner be locked in a dank cell and sodomised relentlessly than suffer partying with Jeremy Clarkson and the rest of the Chipping Sodbury set, so perhaps there is some justice after all.

And no matter how much she parties, she’ll always be, to me, a sort of national Picture of Dorian Gray.

Anyway, it was certainly a victory for her barrister, David Cameron’s brother. Well done.

Meanwhile, we are told to be outraged at the behaviour of the footballer Luis Suarez, who allegedly bit an Italian player when playing for his country, Uruguay, in the World Cup. If he did the deed, he should be banned, of course.

But the debate around him is hilarious.

On the sofa are TV pundits like Thierry Henry of France, who once knowingly cheated by handling the ball to create the goal that dumped Ireland out of a World Cup, yet escaped censure; Glenn Hoddle, who once said disabled people were being punished for misdeeds in an earlier life; Robbie Savage, famous for his aggressive style and holder of the dubious honour of the fourth-highest total of yellow cards awarded in Premier League history.

Judging Suarez are Fifa, whose award of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar was mired in corruption.

Watching on are players like Brazil’s superstar Neymar, who elbowed a Croatian opponent in the opening game of the tournament yet escaped  censure; the rest of the Italian team, who hacked their way viciously through the match with Suarez’s Uruguay; Yaya Toure, the £200,000-a-week-or-so Manchester City star who whined about being disrespected by his club when they overlooked his birthday; the Brazilian striker Fred, who cheated in the opening match by throwing himself to the ground in the penalty box to win a crucial penalty for his team; the Cameroon defender Benoit Assou-Ekoto, who headbutted one of his own team-mates in an earlier match. In the stands are honoured guests like the Argentinian Diego Maradona, who cheated to handball a goal against England to ensure his country progressed in 1986; Zinedine Zidane, who headbutted Marco Matterazzi in the 2006 World Cup final after the Italian allegedly made vile remarks about Zidane’s sister; and people like the German supporters who ‘blacked up’ their faces for their team’s game against Ghana.

No wonder the world is turning on Luis Suarez. It’s so easy to have a pantomime villain on whom to throw all the blame for a sport that’s been in the gutter for so long it’s forgotten any stars even exist.

Oh, and summer’s over.

And all that ranting? That’s not even the half of it. Not even the fucking half of it.

But on the stereo I have had The Clash so loud the slates are plummeting from the roof, and now the Be Good Tanyas’ Song for R, and a child’s arms stretched out for love, like my boys reached out for me when they were small, and still do sometimes. Stretch them out, stretch them out in this shitty world. Stretch them out.