Work is the curse of the drinking classes, according to the song by Cilla Black.

I have to agree with the old girl, as I often think work is a curse. Perhaps that’s what Her Majesty’s prison officers think, which is why they decided to hang up their keys for one day last week.

All that militant pandemonium got me thinking about Karl Marx and the alienation and exploitation of the worker and Marx’s views on the striking man. In what many consider his best work, Rabbits and other Vegetables, Marx elegantly asserts that when there is not order there is disorder, when there is chaos there is not order and when there is not order, disorder or chaos there is a fourth state that the human brain cannot fully comprehend.

Carl Jung, in his Studeis in Word Association, termed this Das Capital Letter. And the essay he handed to Sigmund Freud in 1905 is celebrated annually in Jung’s native Switzerland is with the Running of the Goat and other festivities. After this Marx gets rather bogged down with modal retardation in adolescent pygmies and in my view does not fully explain his Mushroom Theory.

Talking of mushrooms, that was precisely the effect the prison officers’ wildcat walk-out had on Liverpool Crown Court. It made the Battle of Orgreave look like a Quaker’s tea party, producing nothing short of Marxian chaos. I was forced to leave my Sudoku half-done and venture out to the public lobby where they apparently serve a cup of soup in a plastic cup. Strange, but true.

All sorts of hearings that were supposed to take place didn’t. None of the prisoners was brought to court to be told their fate, no video-link hearings could take place because the prison officers were not inside the jail and were outside waving placards and possibly standing arond a brazier.

So the prisoners literally didn’t get their day in court and it didn’t end there. There was more comedy court chaos on Friday morning when technology let the video-link court down. Once it was up and running the impish clerk said to the impatient barristers: “OK, the judge will be in in three minutes.” One of them said: “Why so long, has he got a limp?”

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