Advanced Preparations

Given the Imperial Haystack's repeated assurances that Britain will leave the EU on 31 October come what may, it is hardly surprising that the Conservative Party's members of the European Parliament are advertising for new servants to start on 1 November. The role will be "a great opportunity to learn more about the work of the European Parliament and the European Union, gaining practical experience in a demanding political office," and therefore presumably will entail minimal actual contact with members of the Conservative Party. It will also require "a basic knowledge of the European Union," which seems a little unfair as it will obviously be a handicap when seeking ministerial office; as will the demand for a certain level of literacy. It remains as yet unclear whether the advertisement was sanctioned by the Imperial Haystack or any of his entourage: it is true that the present Secretary of State for Wogs, Frogs and Huns has only recently realised that Great Britain is an island, but there are regrettable gaps in the public record concerning how many ministers of the Crown are aware of the order of the months.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Gingivitis xlvii-lxxiii

It was not even approximately during this time that the Father of Teeth came upon a settlement of wooden buildings, the inhabitants of which looked with open disgust upon the sheen of his plastic raincoat and the gleam of his perspex-dentured grin. They themselves wore clothes woven from dried grass and waterproofed with fish-grease, to highly olfactory effect; and if the community was civilised enough for dentures, their use was clearly a privilege not widely bestowed.

When the Father of Teeth approached within fifty yards, a slave was sent out to meet him and induct him into the necessary sterilities. "My masters," said the slave, "live according to nature and in defiance of the artificial ticks embedded in their brain matter by the evil microplasts of yore."
"And how do they know," said the Father of Teeth, "that the defiance in their minds is not itself the product of something embedded in their brains, by means evil or artificial or otherwise?"
"Such matters are not the province of such as I," replied the slave; "they are the province of our priests, who generally respond to questions by taking a stone axe to the questioner's skull, in order to ensure the legitimacy of his cerebral endowments."

So the Father of Teeth asked the slave to guide him around the settlement and back onto the pathways of ill health and sin. As they walked, the Father of Teeth saw a dancer practising and remarked to the slave concerning the grace and balance of her limbs. "Indeed," said the slave, "her balance is most exquisite, and will make a good preparation for the life which awaits her."
"What life is that?" asked the Father of Teeth.
"The natural life of a natural female, according to nature's law," said the slave; "it will consist chiefly of carrying laundry on her head, and her flexibility of limb should ensure that she won't disturb her husband while she's doing it."
"Sounds nearly as good as a robot," said the Father of Teeth.

Girly Cops

Although it's perfectly fine for nice people to break the law, there still remains the problem of how to maintain order among the plebs should a similar policy be adopted by people less intelligent, public-spirited and responsible than Boris Johnson. With the approach of the Conservative Party's annual rah-and-blah, it is natural that new toys for the police should be a somewhat higher priority than (to pick a random example) replacing a few of the backroom staff who were booted out in the name of the Osbornomic miracle. The Government intends to spend ten million arming officers with stun guns, which among other advantages tend to be used disproportionately on the kind of people Boris Johnson likes to snigger at. Trendy lefty police chiefs have objected, and are therefore almost certainly traitors, Remainers and enemies of the people who believe in abiding by court rulings.

Well, of All the Cheek

Mere weeks from VE Day 2.0, the democracy-devouring dictator of the Brusso-Strasbourgian Nazi-Soviet monolith has had the gall to blame Her Majesty's Government for buccaneering its way to the sunlit uplands. In fact, not only have Britain's orders to the Euro-wogs over the past three years been a model of clarificatory straight-talkingness, but Her Majesty's Government has informed the Euro-wogs in considerable detail of their own depraved moral status should they contemplate the least disobedience. One of the present Secretaries of State for Jingo and Rah-Rah emphasised in a recent speech that the Euro-wogs must resolve the Irish border or else, yet so far it seems little progress has been made. Meanwhile, at the heart of the Recrudescent Imperium itself, parliamentarians have very unfairly failed to pass the deal which Her Majesty's Government has pluckily failed to place before them, while subversives and surrender monkeys persist in voting against British values; and this despite the Imperial Haystack's recent clarification of the great British democratic principle that the way to avoid death threats is to do as you're told.

Applied Recidivism

In another stirring example of the Conservative Party's respect for law and order, the Secretary of State for Gun-Running has admitted to a further breach of the ban on arms sales to the head-chopping House of Saud. Unlike her boss, who simply blathers, squats where he is and does not resign, the Mary Elizabeth Appliance prefers to blather and offer an unreserved apology, after which she squats where she is and does not resign. After last week's revelation of her previous honest mistake, Truss failed to take the precaution of allowing for further revelations in the future, thereby granting her enemies all the more scope for performative moral shock. It remains as yet unclear how responsibility for this particular fiasco should be apportioned between the staffing culls of the Osbornomic miracle, the legendary incompetence of the appliance, and the general criminality of the Government as a whole; fortunately, a departmental review is already in progress towards an appropriate placing of blame upon migrants, Brussels and the Labour Party.

Not to be Trusted

Despite the pragmaticising moderativity of the Recrudescent Imperium among others, the mad mullahs of Iran remain fanatically, irrationally opposed to negotiating with terrorists. The Trumpster, having unilaterally torpedoed the international agreement over Iran's alleged future nuclear deterrent, was hoping for a photo-opportunity; but the Iranian president evidently has one or two outdated scruples about the kind of company he cares to be seen in. The holder of Her Majesty's great office of state for Wogs, Frogs and Huns had a bit of a blather about "bringing into scope Iran's wider destabilising activities," by which he meant the recent non-fatal attack on an oil facility by the people on whom the head-chopping House of Saud is using all those shiny British-sold weapons; but it appears that the mad mullahs are too far gone to heed even the diplomacy of Dominic Raab.

Just Legalisms

The foes of the people have struck,
Betraying our stout British pluck!
Our waters so blue
Are clouded anew
With crude constitutional muck!

Must Bozza keep laws like the ruck?
His privilege must he now shuck?
Refrain, willy-nilly,
From stuffing his filly
With portions of taxpayers' tuck?

Has Bozza lost all of his luck?
His leadership out for a duck?
Let's all reconvene
Our criminal scene,
And see if the House gives a fuck!

Stormy Hale

More Conspiracies

While Britain forges ahead into the sunny uplands of global buccaneering, the lesser breeds are trying desperately to recapture the lost glory of the 1950s. The perfidious Frogs and the beastly Huns have repeated their shabby Common Market trick of combining their foreign forces in a cunning collaborationist cabal and then setting conditions to make it impossible for Britain to join in. Not only have they been planning for six months (an obvious and deliberate snub to a nation whose present planning capabilities rarely extend beyond the next news cycle), but they are plotting to impose half a dozen initiatives on anyone foolish enough to accept their un-American blandishments. Five are about cyberspace, democracy, equality and other things which Her Majesty's Government either doesn't like or cannot cope with; another is about controlling lethal autonomous weapons systems, which would not only draw an iron curtain across British business but runs directly contrary to one of the few statutes to bask in the approval of the Trumpster and his head-tribble, namely the Second Amendment. Her Majesty's Government has condescended to support one of the initiatives, probably through inability to understand it; beyond that, the Recrudescent Imperium of Westminster, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands is patently far too global to bother with multilateralism.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Dentures clxvii-clxxxix

Some hundreds of years before, however, the Father of Teeth was caught up in a great parade. A woman in a white coat was borne aloft by a baying mob, who taunted her with afflictions real and imaginary and defied her to write them a prescription. Mothers waved their children at her and demanded, speaking as mothers, that she account for her activities as an abortionist; and when the woman in the white coat tried to reply, the mob drowned her out with screams of "Mere theory!"

"Most edifying," said the Father of Teeth, "but what exactly does it signify?"
"It is a tribute to the divine justice," explained a passing theologian. "Since God is just, there is only one explanation for disease, namely that the afflicted deserve their affliction. Therefore doctors who can't cure are laughing-stocks, while those who can are sorcerers."
"What about dentists?" asked the Father of Teeth.
"Dentists are renowned for their ability to cause pain and humiliation," said the passing theologian, "and are therefore exempt from the ritual of moral correction, except when they charge too little."
"You are," said the Father of Teeth, "not far from the kingdom of heaven."

For the Record

A Rather Privileged Extract

Jellyfish, 339
Jews, DC's tolerance for and love of 386; Labour Party's enduring hatred of 390-392, 706-718 passim
Jism, Danny Alexander and 427-429; Vince Cable and 427; Nick Clegg and 427-431 passim
Jobs, 221; for the boys 1-700 passim; for the plebs, lost 239
Jobs, Steve, DC's admiration of 119
Johnson, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel, friend of DC 227; ancestry of 225; Bullingdon Club 224-229; George Osborne and, 228; borrows money from DC 225, 227; flushes DC's head in toilet 225; trashes restaurant with DC 226; copies DC's essays 227; on plebs 226, 421; on poor people 226; on Have I Got News For You 379; on Europe 301; on danger from Europe 302; on Nazism 302; on Stalinism 302; on conservatism 302; on television 303; on holiday 303-479 passim; and Dominic Cummings 302; and Darius Guppy 302; as Mayor of London 357-359; contrasted with Muslim successor 360; and cable cars 358; and Routemaster 358; and garden bridge 358; and Tube strikes 358; how DC would have handled things 359-365; hair 227, 352, 679; liberalism of 539; anarchism of 540; conservatism of 541; fascism of 543; personal failings of 544-551; DC's moral advice to 544-547; DC's spiritual advice to 546-549, 653-723 passim; DC's sexual advice to 725 (footnote)
Joker, the (plebeian film character), DC's moral advice to 548; fictitiousness of, DC's discovery of 557
Jowell, Tessa, London Olympics and 624; DC's admiration for financial arrangements of 624; death of 625
Jungle bunnies, DC's tolerance for and love of 387; importance of control 387; Theresa May and 388; Windrush generation 389

Buccaneering New Precautions

After only three years of negotiation with itself and, more peripherally, with the European Union, the British Conservative Party has finally understood what's been going wrong all this time. The problem, of course, is that the beastly Euro-wogs have been able to see, and even to discuss among themselves, the proposals under consideration by Her Majesty's Government. Nothing so badly weakens the negotiating position of a global nation as an artificially imposed necessity for lesser breeds to know what one is thinking; particularly if one's thinkers happen to be of the calibre of Dominic Raab, Stephen Barclay and the Imperial Haystack. Accordingly, the beastly Euro-wogs have been sternly reminded that British papers (also called non-papers, in tribute to their non-policy status) must be treated as the property of Her Majesty's Government, and not passed around to be seen by just anybody, let alone by members of the organisation with which Her Majesty's Government occasionally claims to be negotiating. Since the beastly Euro-wogs are in belligerent mood and unlikely to comply, Her Majesty's Government has taken the additional cunning precaution of ensuring that the non-policies in the non-papers have all been non-starters from an earlier stage of the proceedings. It all seems jolly watertight.

Given the Jolly Old Treatment

British values of decency, tolerance and thrift have brought another happy result, namely the death at thirty-nine of an asylum seeker who had the temerity to suffer from cancer. The Ministry for Wog Control denied her NHS treatment on a technicality, although she was allowed a backstop treatment for which she was presented with a bill for £3379. By the usual coincidence, free health care was granted a day after the Guardian contacted the Ministry. Speculation that chemotherapy at an earlier stage might have saved her life merely demonstrates yet again that medical personnel need to concentrate on their job of maintaining the hostile environment for migrants, and leave important medical decisions to the Home Office.

Red Lines

Someone has finally broken the news to the Imperial Haystack that a border between the EU and the Recrudescent Imperium would in fact have many characteristics of a border, including border checks which would need to be made at the border on most of the goods crossing the border, by virtue of the fact that the border would be a bordery sort of thing and would resemble, in many ways, a border. Not being a details type of chap, let alone a respecter of boundaries, the Imperial Haystack was apparently a little nonplussed at the news, although Downing Street spokesbeings have hastened to deny the malicious rumour-mongery perpetrated by the Stalinist fifth-columnards at the Financial Times. Meanwhile Team Britannia has responded to the revelation with characteristic entrepreneurial fortitude, by claiming that it wants to play at negotiating every day instead of just twice a week, in spite of the humourless Euro-wogs' continuing insistence that the negotiations should involve something other than the British Conservative Party shouting at itself.

An Honest Mistake that Anyone Could Have Made

Further proof, if any were needed, that perspective is a thing of the past has emerged in the fuss being made over a minor secretarial error by one of the Johnson administration's more gormless token fillies. It is no easy matter to replace an intellectual firebucket of the calibre of the disgraced former Minister for Werritty; but the Imperial Haystack has found a worthy successor in Liz Truss, apparently surnamed for the gusset-busting weight of bollocks she can sustain without coming undone. With the Saudi rampage in Yemen reaching ever more profitable heights of pious humanitarianism, Truss absent-mindedly approved licences to export military equipment for use by Whitehall's favourite Islamic fundamentalist head-choppers. Even the rigorously undemanding standards of Her Majesty's Government stop a little short of permitting such direct involvement, so Truss dashed off an apology and toddled back to her plans for flooding the New Zealand economy with chlorinated British lamb. Nevertheless, various malcontents and citizens of nowhere continue to whinge and whine as though the poor appliance had done something wrong. Unfortunately Truss, as a mere token filly and a commoner, cannot avail herself of the Johnson defence and simply proclaim that the law doesn't apply to nice people. Instead she has to resort to the altogether more plebeian plea that she is so sorry for having broken the law that she doesn't need to be punished; which of course makes the malcontents' caddish conduct all the more unchivalrous.

The Phoney Warrior

Solo
Dear Brexit's Hope, by twits renowned
In loud œncomium,
With chicken wattle art thou crowned
At vacant podium!
Thou warrior for Britain's way,
Defender of the ERG,
Hast fled the field in disarray
From mighty Luxembourg.

Chorus
Blond and bloated Tory, mugger of the poor,
How shall we deplore thee, who art such a boor?
Higher still and higher raised by racist set,
Sods made thee mighty, much to our regret!
Sods made thee mighty, much to our regret!

Solo
Thy lies are blue as Ocean wide,
As England small and loud:
A mouth that dares, and heeds not pride
Nor causes to be proud;
And while it brags and boasts a lot
Of what thy betters won
Weary Britannia looks on what
Thou silly squit hast done.

Chorus
Blond and bloated Tory, blatherer in chief,
How shall we deplore thee, sneaky chicken thief?
For the House of Commons far too weak and wet,
Sods gave thee Blighty, and thou blight'st us yet!
Sods gave thee Blighty, and thou blight'st us yet!

Johnson B Snobgargle

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Premolars lxii-lxxvii

Nevertheless, during the Carboniferous Era the Father of Teeth was yet again greatly annoyed by dying vegetation. There were few things he found more depressing than being surrounded by mourning ferns and weeping gymnosperms. He did his best to argue against long-drawn-out funerary rites, and to encourage cremation instead; but the atmosphere was so moist and humid that, even after a couple of million years' closely reasoned advocacy, the fashion never really caught on.

Exasperated, the Father of Teeth chewed his way through several rainforests and scattered upon the remnants a peculiarly mutated species of bacteria which he found breeding ferociously among the blackest of his gums. "Do something useful with that lot," ordered the Father of Teeth, and then forgot about the whole business.

A little later, the Creator of the universe was pottering around in His usual aimless fashion, turning trilobites into other trilobites and so forth, when He was distracted by a meteor in the sky. His finger slipped, and a viviparous perversion of Nature scuttled squeaking into the undergrowth. "Oh well," said the Creator of the universe, "probably no harm done."

Shapps Makes a Splash

Mere experts and citizens of nowhere have reacted with their usual humourless foreignness to a rah-rah by the Ministry for Motoring. An advertisement for the next thirty years of maritime adventure, during which the bulldog breed's long and happy relationship with brine will doubtless come in handy for establishing Empire 2.0 in those bits of the world that remain above the flood-waters, has been criticised for featuring images of ships used in commercial piracy and the slave trade. While it is difficult for Britons to avoid the knowledge that they once abolished the slave trade, comparatively little attention has been given to the few preceding decades of enthusiastic participation; although the day now fast approaches when we can once again allow our national pride to encompass such politically incorrect entrepreneurial buccaneering. The Ministry for Motoring offered the usual gracious expression of regret for the excessive sensitivities of others; and in all fairness, one can hardly expect a government which removes Chris Graybeing only to replace him with Michael Green and Sebastian Fox to show much ability at learning from the past.

Embarrassment of Riches

Moderates and other right-wingers in the Netherlands are tossing their clogs over the Amsterdam Museum's decision to dispense with the term Gouden Eeuw (Golden Age) in reference to an era of highly profitable military aggression, poverty, exploitation and slavery. An MP for the governing party squealed that the country was on a slippery slope from changing street signs to re-writing history, while a spokesbeing for the very 'umbly-named Christian Democratic Appeal begged to point out that one must not erase the past but simply explain its comparatively insignificant negative aspects while retaining national pride about an era of highly profitable military aggression, poverty, exploitation and slavery: "Nothing wrong with that either." It remains as yet unclear whether the victims of culture shock plan to redefine the Nazi occupation as a golden age on the grounds that, whatever its negative aspects, some people did rather well out of it for a while.

Tentatively Approaching the Reality-Based Universe

Those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear; which doubtless explains why the Department for Emaciation, Flooding and Rationing of Availables (Defra) has refused a Freedom of Information request about the dietary consequences of leaving the EU without a deal. The request, by the Green MP Caroline Lucas, was dismissed with the time-honoured excuse about jeopardising the non-existent negotiations with our oppressors in the Brusso-Strasbourg megabunker who only read the news if it's delivered in foreign; but the spokesbeings also cited the more rational grounds that ministers can see a strong public interest in keeping the public as ignorant as possible. Granting the rather specialised definition of "public interest" in the Westminster dialect, this surely demonstrates an encouraging degree of realism.

A Very British Apology

Few things are more Britishly hypocritical than an exclusionary apology, and the Archbishop of Canterbury has duly descended to the occasion with an ostentatious self-prostration over one of our Amritsar massacres. A century ago British troops fired on unarmed protestors; the Government admitted to three hundred and seventy-nine fatalities and twelve hundred wounded, and Winston Churchill, despite his belief in the beastliness of Indians, was moved to condemn the business as somehow atypical of the British Empire. With a similar degree of moral courage, the Archbishop apologised not in the name of common humanity, common decency or common sense, but in the name of his vicious little god, whose liberal attitude to genocide is only too well known. Although Daveybloke and Tumbledown Tessie, one casually racist and the other obsessively racist, both stopped carefully short of apologising for the atrocity, neither of them managed to be quite so brazenly crass as that.

Ass Gets Mediaeval

While there are no doubt significant advantages to being one of the Conservative Party's token darkies - few normally Oedipal sons could resist a chance of supporting legislation that would have kept their fathers in poverty - such blessings are inevitably balanced by the continual, unrelenting necessity to prove one's supremacist credentials by making a public arse of oneself. Fired by the rah-rah of a right-wing cant-tank, the ever-compliant Sajid Javid has gone all fervent about updating Britain's fourteenth-century treason law, causing an enemy of the people to use his inaugural speech as independent reviewer of terrorism legislation to suggest that there might be more efficient ways of fighting terrorism than grandstanding for the hanging-and-flogging fetishists. No longer satisfied with removing citizenship from victims of extremist grooming and letting their infant children die, the compliant Javid now wants to prosecute them as traitors rather than as terrorists. Naturally, thanks to the present administration's famous moderation, there would be no danger whatever of an updated treason law being utilised in the crushing of rebellious Scots, recalcitrant parliamentarians, metropolitan élitists or the wrong sort of Jew.

Crimes Against the Unborn

NHS South East London, which decides how to dole out treatments in six London boroughs, has apologised for its policy of denying IVF treatment to single women. The organisation's guidelines cited "Aristotle's principle of equality" to justify its family values, which specify that one person is not two and therefore a single parent lacks the worthiness of a couple, to say nothing of being a likely benefits claimant and burden on the taxpayer. Presumably the policy will now be revised so that single women can exercise their inalienable right of choice in adding yet more little maggots to the overflowing human barrel, and yanking children from oblivion into a world that, if we are optimistic enough to assume no global wars or pogroms, will very likely drown, starve or broil them before their thirtieth birthdays.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Cavities xlix-lxi

On the eve of the battle, however, the Father of Teeth took cigars and sherry with the commanding general of the forces of decency, moderation and civilised values. The general had just given the coup de grâce to an interminable anecdote about his days as a subaltern in a completely different army of decency, moderation and civilised values: which, as chance would have it, was the very army which the present forces of decency, moderation and civilised values were poised to annihilate on the morrow.

"Some little time after I started out myself," said the Father of Teeth, "the arts of war had not yet attained their present level of sophistication; it was all done with flint and bone, all very finely worked and shaped, you understand, but not particularly effective in terms of bangs for the bucks. A stone axe-head took so much effort to produce that any weapon which actually made a kill was considered sacred. It was said to have absorbed the power of the man who had died, and became a revered treasure."

"Remarkable," said the commanding general of the forces of decency, moderation and civilised values. "Imagine having the hypocrisy to regard an enemy as someone worth respecting."

"Later on," continued the Father of Teeth, "they used swords and maces, and bows and arrows, and misericordes, which were the short knives used to cut the throats of knights who had been unhorsed and couldn't get up because of the weight of their armour. It was customary for the bowmen to venture onto the field and recover their arrows in case of further need, but the arrows rarely became heirlooms because the archers were merely practising thrift."

"The swords and shields and maces were often preserved, however," said the commanding general of the forces of decency, moderation and civilised values. "Society had advanced enough by then to remember the battles rather than grovelling to the memory of the deservedly slaughtered, which meant that the weapons could be polished clean of blood and brains without the risk of sacrilege." He indicated the impressive array of weapons in his own cabinets, all of which were immaculately shiny and untainted with the anatomical components of the unworthy.

"Later still," said the Father of Teeth, "I was called upon to witness a battle conducted by mechanical means. In a way it was very efficient, with dead and maimed in the tens of thousands; but millions of metal cartridges were ejected by the recoil of their own firing and left in the mud to rust, which of course was neither noble nor thrifty."

So the commanding general of the forces of decency, moderation and civilised values gave orders that, as soon as victory was secured, his men should chivalrously roam the battlefield and collect all spent cartridges for recycling. The Father of Teeth and most fatal casualties above non-commissioned rank were exempt from the order on compassionate grounds.

Restless Rustics

Disappointingly enough, Britain's farmers appear to be joining the chorus of malcontents spewing pessimistic nihilism all over our sunny uplands. Instead of enjoying the glorious sunshine and soft refreshing rain of our ever more innovative climate, they whinge and whine about the harvest; instead of rejoicing at the approaching Britishisation of their casual labour, they clamour for the horrors of free movement. They complain about cauliflowers while soft fruit yields have enjoyed a bumper year, notably in blackcurrants and the Conservative Party. Fanatics that they are, they threaten to sacrifice their own profits to ideological Remoanerism by exporting grain to Africa rather than allowing it to mature in warehouses already bulging with Brexit benefits. Fortunately, the Government has said some words about being committed and introducing new schemes, and will soon be publishing its own figures about the harvest in which there will be enough of everything for everyone who deserves it.

And After All He's Done For Them

West Yorkshire Police have reacted with dour northern ingratitude to their recently-awarded privilege of being used as a scenic backdrop for the Imperial Haystack. Not only were officers given a chance to spend an hour enjoying the sunshine, but rather than listen to some tedious if probably fictitious recruitment figures they were treated to a fizzing display of the Haystack's inspired wof waf woof and argle bargle fargle. Nevertheless, the inevitable cavils and complaints are emerging because the police are not supposed to be used for party politics beyond the time-honoured cant about bobbies on the beat. One officer was even ungracious enough to faint, though whether from heat exhaustion or mere exposure to the Haystack's patriotic pheromones has not been reliably established. If the former, no doubt the lesson learned by the new one-nation Conservative Party will be that the force needs more coloureds because they can better withstand the climate's increasing balminess.

Conspiracy of Sensibles

As has occasionally happened before, Italian politics appears to be suffering from a severe lack of Britishness. Cool-headed pragmatism has prevailed against the Ruritanian goose-stepping for which our mother of democracies has made itself renowned, with the migrant-baiting Matteo Salvini forced out of power by an unforeseen alliance of less patriotic spirits. Salvini's interior ministry has been given to a "migration specialist" who, in another break with British values, is expected to spend more time negotiating with the EU than making noise on social media. It remains as yet unclear whether any effort will be made to reduce the migrant hordes by refraining from making their homelands unlivable, or whether the EU will simply concern itself with drowning them more quietly.

Out of Their League

With the sunny uplands of liberty looming closer every day, mere retailers are attempting a ludicrous pretence that they know more about retail than the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove. The recently-appointed Minister for Not Having Stabbed Boris in the Back Twice in a Row stated in a BBC interview that, should Britain choose to chastise the obdurate Euro-wogs by crashing out with no deal, supplies and prices of fresh food would not be adversely affected. However, the British Retail Consortium claims otherwise, predicting shortages and extra expense as a result of new customs checks and lack of necessary storage space. For all that their spokesbeing added a touch of much-needed plausibility by blaming Christmas and the French, the retailers have clearly taken the present era's compulsory optimism to an unwarranted extreme. They seem to imagine that, just because they spend their working lives organising the purchase, storage, transport and sale of goods in large quantities, they have some sort of clue about the mechanics of retail. They have failed to take into account that Michael Gove is a Murdoch flunkey who, even if he no longer writes about shopping himself, certainly knows people who do.

Some Risk of Terminal Logical Inexactitude

The Haystack stood up at the box of dispatch.
He knew the Remoaners had now met their match;
Before his charisma they'd cower and flee,
And true statesmen all would go tee-hee-hee-hee.
So when he was asked "will you break Britain's law?"
He quickly reminded them who won the war,
And Britain sobbed "God save the Queen!" to a man,
While punditry's orgasm was heard in Japan.
Alas! with more questions assailing his brain,
This level of wit was too much to maintain:
As soon as his larynx was up to full spin,
He raised up his foot and he rammed it right in.
"We're flouncing off out with a deal or with none;
Now, what preparations for when we are gone?"
The Haystack was flustered, his balance thrown off;
He answered, most reasonably: "waffle woff."
And when they inquired, "have the talks progressed far?"
He duly explained "argle bargle, bah hah."
Alas for the Haystack, the fiends had a plot
To stop him from showing them just what was what:
Irrevocably send proceedings due south
By ruthlessly making him open his mouth.

Alexander Boris de Piffel Pontifex

The Nation's Vigour Preserved

Even now that Britain has finally and apocalyptically taken back control from the effete establishment élite, it seems the cult of Muscular Christianity remains not altogether dead. At least three thousand claims of asylum on grounds of persecution over sexual orientation or transgender status have been refused by the Ministry for Wog Control in the past three years; in one reported case, a man's claim was rejected because the tribunal judge didn't think he looked poncey enough. Most of the bogus claims (in Standard English, claims) originate in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria, where the legacy of the first British Empire has ensured a continuing attitude of manly robustness. Britons who take pride in the legacy of Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing will be aglow with patriotic health and beauty.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Carnassials ccclxxix-cccxci

Nevertheless, after several weeks of wandering in the desert the Father of Teeth came upon a great wooden pillar, which stood eye-wateringly upright directly in the path of his rapidly travelling nose. Vengefully he inserted his second-best set of self-renewing gnashers and began to gnaw with serene relish. Soon an assembly of indignant citizens appeared and threw things at him, and when that didn't work they offered to sell him individually-packaged wild locusts in honey; but the Father of Teeth merely spat splinters at them and continued with his gnawing. Eventually the most distinguished citizen of all approached and personally requested that he desist.

"Why should I?" asked the Father of Teeth.
"You may not be aware of it, respected sir," said the most distinguished citizen, "but this pillar supports a platform, which supports a saint, who has made himself holy by his retreat from the world, and has thereby attracted unto himself a gigantic fame and following, Just over that ridge of rocks is the town which has grown up to cater to the pilgrims' needs, with bed and board and all the most ascetic trimmings at prices that require barely more than the faith of a mustard seed to be considered almost reasonable."
"You're right," said the Father of Teeth. "I wasn't aware of it, but now I am; and I still have not heard any reason why I should refrain from devouring this eremitical erection."
"Surely," said the most distinguished citizen, "the combination of market forces and moral imperative must give you pause. Our saint is, as I mentioned, a most holy person, and would undoubtedly be prepared to bestow spiritual riches upon anyone who willingly refrains from sin. Upon the infidel and transgressor, however, there is every possibility that retribution may or may not descend, within a time-frame to be determined by the Almighty, but assuredly shorter than we imagine."

But the Father of Teeth continued to gnaw, because once inserted his second-best set of self-renewing gnashers tended to renew itself at a considerable rate of knots, with rather inconvenient results if he didn't keep chewing. The most distinguished citizen had hardly finished his peroration before the wooden pillar creaked and groaned and then fell with a great crash to the ground, though fortunately nowhere near the town, which had been built at a respectable distance out of consideration for the investors in hired telescopes and disposable binoculars. Even more fortunately, the saint was unaffected by the catastrophe as he had been dead for some years. This of course meant that the town's current prosperity was even more miraculous than anyone had imagined, and it was all the Father of Teeth could do to decline the citizens' offer of an even higher pillar for his exclusive personal use.