Cancer? It's Your Own Silly Fault

Since the Government has no business improving the lives of people who cannot afford private healthcare, the Minister for Health and News Corporation has ordered the proles to start looking after those left behind. It is unheard-of for old people to have no living friends or relatives; therefore the sad and profitless deaths of customers for council-funded funerals must be due to a lack of family values among the benefits-claiming classes, whom Hunt now urges to adopt a granny during their copious free time. Hunt also urges the little folk to eat their greens, take proper exercise and perhaps follow the example of Britain's Head Boy and chillax a bit now and then, because unhealthy lifestyle choices are putting pressure on that precious NHS for which Hunt and his chums have shown such overwhelming concern.

They Have Fought Us on the Beaches, the Bastards

Britain's Head Boy has been doing the statesmanship thingy in response to the murders in Tunisia: he has called a Cobra meeting, dispatched the mad old Home Office cat lady to the scene where she can frighten off any more evil-doers, and had a bit of a burble about what to do next. Since Trident doesn't appear to have deterred the scoundrels, Britain's Head Boy has pledged a "full spectrum" response, which represents an advance over previous pledges (nation's books balanced within a single parliament; no top-down restructuring of the NHS; money no object for the victims of Lake Paterson, etc.) in that it scorns humble falsehood to scale the giddy heights of blathering inanity. A spokesbeing duly clarified matters with the admission that he didn't know what the pledge meant, but that he assumed it meant something or other, of the occurrence of which there is no sign whatever. What it probably means, of course, is that the Government will continue to use the Fighting Sons of Tony as an excuse for doing more or less as the Government pleases, particularly in the fields of all-pervasive snoopery and casual racism. Meanwhile, ministers "privately acknowledge that the starting point for defeating Isis is a stable Iraqi government that embraces alienated Sunni Muslims" - in other words, an administration much like the one headed by that cherished chum and business associate of successive British governments, Saddam Hussein.

Rocky Recovery

Conservative MPs in Yorkshire are squealing because the region's heritage is being dismantled by non-corporate entrepreneurs. Buildings of all kinds, including those that could potentially profit Party donors, are suffering the depredations of stone thieves. It is suspected that the thieves are selling the stone to rogue builders, whose concerns may not be sufficiently oligarch-oriented to qualify them as bona-fide engines of the Osbornomic miracle. Were the risk of a public panic not so great, there might even be whispers of a danger to house prices. Stone is, of course, a profoundly Conservative resource, being not only a useful ingredient for mansions and vertical prole deterrents, but also a traditional weapon in witch-hunts and lynch mobs.

Tunisia Terror: Dave Steps In

British horror fury at British terror horror

Britain's Head Boy has ordered the British public to prepare for a high British death toll in the recent terrorist attack on a British-occupied beach in Tunisia.

Confirmed casualty figures currently stand at eight voters and thirty-one nonentities, but figures for the significant dead are expected to rise significantly.

Britain's Head Boy will be doing the statesmanship thingy and chairing an emergency committee meeting of the Cobra emergency committee today, where new measures will be considered and old adjectives recycled to deal with the terrorist attack.

Favoured adjectives for the moment are savage, brutal and evil, which makes quite a change from the usual.

The terrorists have struck at a sensitive time for Britain as the stricken nation prepares to mark Armed Forces Day and pay tribute to the gun-toting, bomb-launching yes-men whose peace-keeping activities since 2003 have done so much to stabilise Arabs and control immigration.

A full team of consular staff, police and Red Cross experts will arrive in Tunisia today to help British victims and their families, despite the possibility of an unintended pull factor which might induce more Britons to get themselves shot in the hope of free healthcare and press attention.

We're Here to Help

It is of course axiomatic that the unemployed have no-one to blame but themselves. Still, even the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith's Department for Workfare and Privation can draw a distinction between the cold, calculating scroungers who have caused the City of London such grief, and those who are merely too insane to upskill their salesmanship. The Conservative manifesto provided for sanctions in cases who refuse medical treatment that might aid their shelf-stacking abilities; and by coincidence Lambeth council now propose to open a mental health emporium in the same building that houses the local idleness police. The DWP had announced that the Streatham scrounger correction office would be the first to have its own emotional adjustment squads, but later announced that the announcement was a mistake. Reassuringly enough, we have the DWP's word for it that people will not be sanctioned for refusing to Mindfulness™ their way into hard-working familydom; although the squalid Minister for Cripple-Kicking, Mark Harper, has suggested that mental health conditions could be included among the pretexts. Most likely he believes the Home Office should simply consult the loonies' medical records and drive PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER vans past their lodgings twice an hour.

We're Making You Poorer, So Spend, Proles, Spend

That notorious tax-and-spend Socialist, the chief executive of Debenhams, has blasphemed against the Osbornomic miracle by asserting that taking money away from people will not necessarily induce them to go out and throw it around the high street. The Bullingdon Club's constant rah-rah about the urgent need to clean up the mess inherited from the Bullingdon Club, and the resulting preparations for a £12-billion war on the working poor, seem somehow to have deterred the proles from fulfilling their sacred duties to consumerdom. It seems that nothing can lubricate the way sufficiently to slide the principles of higher economics into British public's mind; not even the sebaceous charm of Osborne's greasy sucking-piglet grin.

Unlawful Emissions

Few lesser nations can equal British justice, and still fewer can find experts of the calibre of Gove and Graybeing to privatise their legal systems. Doubtless this explains why a Euro-wog court has ruled against its government in a lawsuit over emissions targets. The Dutch government had planned to make cuts of fourteen to seventeen per cent compared with 1990 levels, prompting vindictive tree-huggers to sue under human rights and tort legislation, and the judge ruled that the target was inadequate given the scale of the threat. Clearly Euro-wog politics has not yet reached the mainland's heights of sophistication, where the pledges are either so thoroughly focus-grouped as to be meaningless, or else are blithely breached while everyone else is counting migrants.

Beating Back the Arse-Bandits

Popular prejudice to the contrary, it is possible for politicians to have a sense of shame; although admittedly not often about the sort of sins that would afflict the conscience of an actual human being. The Reverend Blair berated himself for the Freedom of Information Act; the sainted Thatcher was doubtless haunted all her life by her failure to hang more miners; and the Conservative Party of the future will most likely repent in sackcloth and ashes because the law allowing equal marriage rights was passed on its watch. In a compassionate attempt to salve his party's delicate sensibilities and appease the itsy-bitsy feelings of the normal-yet-angry, an empty suit at the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns has banned his office and Britain's embassies from flying the rainbow flag which symbolises LGBT pride, even though the Cabinet Office is quite happy to be seen underneath it. The empty suit's predecessor, Willem den Haag, also had no problem with the flag; but den Haag was intelligent enough to understand that the rights of LGBT people need not interfere with such vital and virtuous Westminster activities as wog-bombing and money-grubbing, which of course is why den Haag was eventually removed from the party leadership and replaced with Iain Duncan Smith.

Our Tough Love Must Penetrate Yet Further

Michael Fallon, the Minister for Wog-Bombing, has laid out his strategy for dealing with his department's share of the Osbornomic miracle. Since the defence budget is going to be cut again, Fallon has suggested that whatever part of the overseas aid budget doesn't go towards kickbacks for private companies or propping up amenable butchers might be used for wog-bombing as well. After all, if the unintended pull factor of not drowning is to be properly counteracted, the beastly migrants in the Mediterranean need to be pushed back a good deal further than the Libyan coast; preferably into countries stable enough to turn them from beastly migrants into hard-working consumers of privatised water. Clearly Britain, which contributed so much to the present stability of Libya, has much to teach the world and its wogs in this regard; and self-evidently Fallon, the man who claimed that electing the Milibeing would be like putting Kim Philby in Downing Street, is just the chap to provide a rational and disinterested perspective.

Your Ruins Are Safe With Us

Someone has apparently informed the Minister for Cultchah that history can be a commodity, too. After only sixty years of making excuses, Britain is to ratify the 1954 Hague Convention, which was set up to protect archaeological, historical and cultural artefacts in wartime. Various little problems have prevented our doing so thus far, such as lack of parliamentary time (translation: MPs have been too busy expressing their unstinting patriotic support for the next bit of wog-bombing) and a supposed risk that Britain might be asked to return some stolen property. There is nothing in the 1954 Hague Convention which would bind the Government to give back the Parthenon Marbles, but these international obligations are often slippery slopes. One moment you're signing up to stop foreigners waging aggressive wars, and then suddenly it turns out that the foreigners believe those same rules apply to you. Anyway, although the Government will continue to exercise itself about the human cost of the more horrific and less business-friendly conflicts, efforts will henceforth also be made to preserve any merchandise and real estate which can be said to form part of the heritage market.

Journo Sapiens

Human beings are eliminating animal species at perhaps a hundred times the normal rate of extinction, and at a considerably higher rate than during the last five mass extinctions to take place on Earth. This is important, according to scientists, because human beings depend on species for their present standard of living. Without species we wouldn't have drones, or homeless deterrents, or the National Rife Association. Fortunately, Barack Obama and the Pope have both made noises about the issue, which will certainly help; and in any case the information in question comes from mere scientists and contains nothing particularly new. That must be why Britain's leading liberal newspaper has filed it away nice and quietly under "Environment".

No Such Thing as Social

Now that we have zero-hours contracts, profitable prisons, arbitrary withdrawal of social security payments and other incentivising measures, there is a correspondingly smaller need for social workers to laze around smoking illegal drugs and encouraging proles to continue their non-productive idleness in luxury hotels. As we have seen from the glamorous events in the Mediterranean, it is axiomatic that helping the poor and vulnerable constitutes a perverse incentive for poor and vulnerable people to imagine they ought to be helped. Accordingly, the Government has cut off the funding for the College of Social Work, the body set up in the wake of the Baby P case, in order to ensure that more children will take due care to be born into hard-working families. A spokesbeing observed that "it was always the objective of the college to become financially self-sufficient and independent from government", and of course there are few better ways of encouraging financial independence than shutting down any institution in need of funding, unless the institution happens to be a bank.

First Do No Harm to Profits

Agitators for mere patient safety are threatening the Minister for Health and News Corporation, Jeremy C Hunt, with legal action because he sought to protect the vulnerable and deserving against the vindictiveness of angry customers. The report into conditions at Stafford hospital recommended imposing a "duty of candour", obliging health-care providers to inform patients when treatment has accidentally caused harm. As a Murdoch drone turned secretary for sneak privatisation, Hunt must find the whole idea of a duty of candour ineffably sniggerable; but he managed to keep a straight face long enough to water down the rules for the benefit of private providers. Lawyers for the charity Action Against Medical Accidents have threatened to take Hunt to the high court unless he ensures that the duty applies equally to all providers; and a spokesbeing was duly extruded to crank out assurances that this is already the case. The two-tier version of the duty of candour must have been the unauthorised work of an overreaching spad, ignorant of the virtues and values of Murdoch drones and secretaries for sneak privatisation.

Beaten Boneys, Royal Charlies

The Prince of Wales has been taking part in yet another rah-rah for British military prowess of old. This time the celebration is not for the glamour and glory of the First World War, but for the pacifying charm of Waterloo, which ended years of European conflict and led to peace in Europe for the next century. (The Crimean War, in the absence of the Eurovision Song Contest, was considered a quasi-Asiatic affair; and Bismarck's little trifecta was achieved with minimal British casualties.) Napoleon's defeat by Britain and a few lesser types led to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, which had contributed so much to the birth of Enlightenment values before the French Revolution and which, upon its return, governed so wisely and well that it was overthrown again after a decade and a half. Interestingly enough, the monarch deposed in 1830 was a silly old fool named Charles who had been kept waiting for his throne until he was well into his sixties.

Ruddy Cheek

Despite five whole years of the greenest government ever, Britain is on course to miss a binding EU target for renewable energy use. Not half a decade of badger-busting, nor the cleansing inundation of much of southern England, nor even the blithering genius of Owen Paterson have been enough to satisfy the Euro-wogs, who continue to insist that the UK's sovereign government should alter its democratic will as sanctified by Magna Carta and the blessing of Rupert Murdoch. The degree of seriousness with which Britain's Head Boy regards the need for renewable energy may be observed in his appointment to the relevant ministry of Amber Rudd, whose qualifications include a career as a journalist, venture-capitalist gofer, and "aristocracy co-ordinator" on Four Weddings and a Funeral. Conservative policy on renewables is mainly intended for the protection of helpless innocents like Shell and BP, and Rudd is reportedly trying to end subsidies for onshore windfarms a year earlier than even the Liberal Democrats would have allowed.

Protecting the Virtuous

Those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear; which no doubt explains why the Home Office has spent the last ten months and a purely reasonable amount of taxpayers' money trying to protect its henchmen at two profit-making wog disposal centres. The Home Office has been throwing taxpayers' money at those reliable Serco people, as well as an American company called GEO Group, in the interests of protecting hard-working British jobs, getting a better deal than the hated public sector could offer, and all those other noble motives that the scumbag press and the Farage Falange are so deafeningly unable to talk about. However, the Home Office has come over all coy when asked to give some account to the taxpayer for the money its corporate chums have received, on the grounds that the commercial interests of the said corporate chums would be damaged if the taxpayer found out just how streamlined, efficient and economical they really are. Showing no regard whatever for such delicate matters of state, the Information Commissioner's Office has ordered the Home Office to treat GEO Group and those delightful Serco people as if they were red-tape-spewing financial black holes like the law courts, the NHS or even, for heaven's sake, the BBC. The Government has not as yet decided whether to appeal the ruling or just to sit around and snigger at it until the Information Commissioner's Office can be sold, dismantled or imprisoned without trial under a British Bill of Rights.

Fighting Rape Through Expensive Lunches

Britain's Head Boy's recent burblings about the evils of female genital mutilation gained even more credibility today from the achievements of his recent Secretary for Wogs, Frogs and Huns, Willem den Haag, in ending sexual violence during war. Den Haag teamed up with Angelina Jolie, who may have hoped some of the glamour would rub off on her, and started an initiative in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. A great deal of money has been spent, including five million on a London conference with £300,000 going on food and half a million on hotels and taxis; meanwhile, much to everyone's surprise, rape and sexual violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo have increased while the number of prosecutions has fallen. Nobody from den Haag's team is based in the DRC, and last year only a single team member even managed to visit the place; Den Haag himself, of course, had more important matters to attend to, such as leading the Conservative Party's bungled vendetta against the Speaker of the House of Commons. Strangely enough, den Haag has now stepped down from his post as "special envoy", just when a Lords committee is about to investigate how much his initiative has delivered.

There's No Place Like Home

Mere reality may be allowed to undermine the Home Office's faith-based wog disposal policy, thanks to the loony-left bureaucrats at the United Nations. A UN inquiry has concluded that Eritrea is still a very dangerous country, where the government carries out extrajudicial killings, torture, rape, indefinite national service and forced labour on a scale of which Westminster can only dream, and where repatriated asylum seekers are arrested, imprisoned as traitors for up to three years, and "systematically ill-treated to the point of torture". Naturally, the Home Office has recently updated its guidance to advise that Eritrea is a rather jolly sort of place, where you can get away with going absent without official leave if you sign a letter of apology and take a non-entrepreneurial attitude towards the payment of income tax. This assessment is based on a somewhat dubious report by the Danish immigration service; one co-author claims that it was rushed into publication in order to keep Eritrean asylum seekers out of Denmark, which is certainly the kind of motivation with which the British Home Office can sympathise. A spokesbeing has duly proclaimed that "a range of other sources" are used in producing Home Office wog disposal guidelines, but it is unclear what percentage of these sources are the Daily Mail.

Mathematical Inexactitude

Almost a quarter of inmates in British prisons are being held in overcrowded conditions. The number was thought to be just under twenty-two per cent, which is of course entirely within the bounds of penological acceptability; but it has now emerged that some prison authorities cannot always count to two. Andrew Selous, the former Duncan Smith minion with responsibility for profitable incarceration, did a bit of a grovel before the House of Claimants and promised to subject future figures to "rigorous quality control". Although he still doesn't know how many real-life prisoners the figures represent, it is just about possible that Andrew Selous' abilities extend as far as bullying a spreadsheet every few months.

Rejoice

Though his life may, for the moment, be wall-to-wall rah-rah and tuck, Britain's Head Boy is undoubtedly aware that there are ructions ahead. The referendum on whether to let the Euro-wogs be our commercial rivals could well split the United Kingdom and, more importantly, the Conservative Party; and in the past quarter-century the Euro-wogs have caused the downfall of at least one Conservative leader and John Major. Accordingly, Daveybloke has toddled off to Brussels and, in the absence of any cripples to kick, has had a bit of a set-to with an Argie. The Falklands war thirty-odd years ago was a rather traumatic event for Argentina, as it turned their then-leader General Galtieri from a favoured British trading partner and chum into a fascist dictator almost overnight; and it seems they are slow to forgive. Britain's Head Boy apparently had words with the Argie foreign minister, who made comments which the liberator of Libya found "threatening". This is understandable, since Argentina is a colonised nation populated largely by immigrant families, quite unlike the stout little Falkland islanders or that fine old English clan of Cameron. There are oil deposits near the islands, it's true; but Britain's Head Boy is unlikely to care much about those, being resolved to power his neo-Victorian Britain through the twenty-first century on a nice, clean mix of workfare labour and native shale gas.

One Nation, One People, One Leader

Britain's Head Boy has been having a bit of a burble about his new, cuddly, one-nation approach to poor-bashing and cripple-kicking. Perhaps unsurprisingly to some, it bears a considerable resemblance to his previous swivel-eyed divide-and-rule approach. Having cut nursing jobs by several thousand, thereby forcing the remains of the NHS to recruit from overseas, the Government now intends to make it harder for employers to recruit from overseas, on the grounds that beastly migrants are coming over here and, as the Crosby-cooked gobbet of bigot-bait hath it, "undermining those who want to work hard and do the right thing". Since Britain's Head Boy has no particular principles of his own, except that he and his chums ought to be allowed to do more or less as they please, it appears that the mad old cat lady in the Home Office is the one now threatening to throw a hissy-fit across his chillaxing. Next week it could be Iain Duncan Smith or the almost equally brilliant Michael Gove, whereupon the new, cuddly, one-nation approach will gain ever more generous boundaries for its ever-growing exclusion zones.

Holding Back the Tide

Yarl's Wood wog disposal centre has come in for yet more criticism over its treatment of vulnerable women and children. Despite being run by those charming Serco people, at a price which the likes of Theresa May and Chris Graybeing have found competitive, the centre continues to use ill-trained staff and indulges in such delightful practices as separating families, denying medication and allowing male turnkeys to walk in without warning on female prisoners. Standards of healthcare have seriously deteriorated in the past few months, even though the responsibility for prisoners' health has been handed over to those efficient people at G4S. Doubtless thanks to the involvement of both G4S and Serco, it is as yet unclear how many of the prisoners at the centre are fictitious. In two-thirds of cases, the Government fails to fail the asylum seekers held at Yarl's Wood, who are then unleashed upon an unsuspecting British public; hence publication of the report into conditions was delayed until after the election, in case of a moral panic in the scumbag press or an attempt by Libyan economic migrants to avail themselves of all that luxury.

Another Historic Milestone on the Way to Yet More Things That Don't Speak as Loudly as Actions

The G7 nations have agreed to start thinking about cutting greenhouse gases and phasing out fossil fuels by about 2095, or earlier if people start drowning in numbers large enough to inconvenience global wealth creators. The G7 governments committed their successors, or perhaps their successors' successors, to "decarbonise the global economy in the course of this century", but retained maximum business-friendly flexibility by refusing to adopt anything so nasty and repressive as binding targets. This, of course, endows the whole exercise with the game-changing force of Daveybloke's threat not to sack ministers who campaign against the Government's official line on the EU referendum.

Still, given the additional commitment to reduce the number of people living in hunger by five hundred million in the next fifteen years, any doubts that Britain's Head Boy continues to be heard at the heart of Europe can be laid comfortably to rest. From the Bullingdon sense of humour to the Murdoch office boy's open relationship with the truth, the fat sweaty fingerprints of Food Bank Britain's CEO are all over that one.

Available Now

My latest is now available, as both quality paperback and glorious PDF. Among its attractions are strange schoolteachers, dubious plumbers, ruined churches and carnivorous plants; witches, aunts and spiders; and pictures like this one:

Ideal for people who have strange children, and people who are strange children, and people whose children are a bit too normal and could do with weirding up a bit.

Freedom of Information

The Health and Social Care Information Centre, which is responsible for providing private companies with details of NHS patients, has suddenly remembered that the small matter of confidentiality has yet to be abolished. As is traditional with Government IT projects, there seems to have been some confusion between two admittedly subtle but nevertheless still slightly distinct concepts, which may be rendered in laymen's terms as The Right Thing To Do and The Wrong Thing To Do. For the moment, at least in theory and subject to the demands of corporate profiteering, patients have the right to register an objection to their details being shared with anyone who might happen to take a benevolent interest in them; some hundreds of thousands of people duly registered their objections, but HSCIC found that it lacked "the resources or processes to handle such a significant level of objection”, so the details were passed on anyway. This is known as lack of fail-safe procedures and was The Wrong Thing To Do. Fortunately, in a few years there will be no further need for bureaucratic middle-men like HSCIC, as the NHS will be mostly owned by the same private companies that are now requesting the data.

Believe Me, I Believe

One of the new token fillies on the Government's front benches has done some bizarre babbling to try and scrounge a headline before the Bullingdon Club forget her name. Tracey Crouch, the sports minister for the political wing of the City of London, is "genuinely rather appalled" at the avarice of others; she used the word genuinely herself, so presumably she isn't just saying it. Crouch also referred to a select committee report to which she contributed, and whose recommendations she and her colleagues wrote while "100% believing in the recommendations". Again, her thinking seems to be that, as a Westminster politician, she will be believed the more she burbles about believing. Crouch further appears to believe that she will be given a free hand to democratise the Football Association, without reference to the wishes of profiteers, oligarchs or thugs. If that belief is genuinely 100% genuine, then most likely the others are as well; anyone who could believe that is far too stupid to fib.

Weird Shit

Thanks partly to the Government's affordable housing scheme for billionaires and partly to the sudden absence of Nick Clegg's head from the Bullingdon Club's toilet pipes, London's sewage has the highest concentration of cocaine in Europe, except at weekends. Underground troops in the war on drugs have proclaimed the dawn of a "rapidly developing scientific discipline with the potential for monitoring real-time population-level trends in illicit drug use". Although it remains as yet unclear what percentage of their samples were taken from between the Chancellor's ears, it is thought that a sudden spike in the population of drug-crazed rats in the capital may go some way towards explaining such phenomena as the Government's long-term economic plan and the persistence of traumatic hallucinations such as the career of Iain Duncan Smith.

Unionist Unpleasantness

One of the uppity Euro-wogs has had the temerity to lecture Britain's Head Boy on what he can and cannot do. Britain's Head Boy is due in Brussels in three weeks to do a bit of posturing in front of the European council president and some other foreigners, and remind them who won the war. The leader of the European bloc of Christian Democrats, which Daveybloke's Conservative Party left some years ago in order to join a gaggle of far-right cranks and chancers, has been so ill-mannered as to point out that those who do not wish to abide by a club's charter don't usually get a voice in what the club members will do. Being a Teutonic pedant, he even went so far as to point out that the EU's aspiration to "ever closer union" - a favourite squealing-point for the Farage Falange and others who aspire to North Korea status - refers to a "union of peoples", not of states or institutions. In other words, it refers to much the same sort of principle as Britain's Head Boy was so fond of evoking until a few minutes after the results of the Scottish independence referendum came in.

Breeding for Fiscal Responsibility

The brilliant Iain Duncan Smith's eugenic plan for the proles has been temporarily derailed by Britain's Head Boy, who has decided that, for this month at least, electoral promises made to breeders are a bit less breakable than those made to users of the NHS. The brilliant Duncan Smith had hoped to achieve behavioural change in the lower orders by withdrawing state support for any offspring beyond the second; although as a paid-up creeping Jesus of the Roman persuasion he presumably disapproves of using contraception, let alone teaching it in schools. "With two children, you send a message where people have to think: can I afford another child?" a minion told the Sunday Murdoch. "If you are on benefits and know the state will support you for the next child and the next, you are not facing the same decisions." If you have two children and another on the way, and lose yet more of your salary to the Osbornomic miracle, or if the British bill of rights declares your employer's right to sack you rather than give paid maternity leave, the brilliant Duncan Smith would stir your family's aspirational pluck and gumption with the loving goad of adversity; while Britain's Head Boy, for his own modernising, metrosexual, robustly humorous part, would doubtless advise a visit to a private physician for a discreet dose of the coathanger.

Coming Soon

The weekend after I published this, the whimsical gremlin that serves me for a muse took it upon itself to dictate a 1700-word story, virtually complete, as I was walking to the local supermarket. The story concerned a nice little girl and some carnivorous plants, and over the past few weeks I've been favoured with glimpses of various other aspects of her weird little world: this is one of them. I have also been moved to perpetrate some whimsical illustrations, somewhat in the style of a talent-free Lee Brown Coye, the incorporation of which into the MS gave me half a day of swearing pagination nightmare courtesy of Microsoft Word. There remain a few bits to do, but the whole thing should be ready to entertain you in a week or two; or possibly to entertain your children, if you have some strange children.