Noise and Hot Air

Newly-released official documents reveal that there were times when the post-Thatcher interregnum was roused from his dreams of cricket at the vicarage to toy with the idea of renaming Heathrow Airport. Having read Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a Mayfair businessman decided that the airport's name was "stupid," being merely the name of the place where the airport was built. He dashed off a missive ordering the interregnum to get busy and rename it after Britain's most successful auto-hagiographer in order to give the proles a bit of moral fibre, and because Winston Churchill has hardly ever been commemorated anywhere at all; fortunately, the provisions of the Official Secrets Act continue to shield the public from knowledge of whether this epistle was written on lavatory paper or in green ink. The interregnum seems to have thought it a jolly good idea, presumably because there was comfort in the the business community's wish to commemorate a chancellor nearly as incompetent as himself. It all came to nothing in the end, possibly because there is already a Churchill airport in Manitoba, and Her Majesty's Government felt that the proles would be disoriented. Doubtless our American colonies can count themselves fortunate that nobody in the business community saw fit to inform the interregnum about the Kingston in Jamaica, the Boston in Massachusetts or the London in Ontario.

Very Interesting, But Stupid

Just because the Recrudescent Imperium will soon be liberated from the crippling economic effects of being inside a major trading bloc, it must not be assumed that the proceeds will be carelessly thrown away. The People's Haystack's plan, if plan is the word I want, to build a bridge between the provinces of Scotland and Northern Ireland has been greeted with polite scepticism by the crypto-wogs across the Irish Sea. As befits a tank-topped bum-boy, the Irish prime minister has expressed a foppish preference for spaffing the money away on infrastructure and education and has suggested, of all things, a feasibility study before the project has even started. He has even implied that the Nazi-Soviet Brusso-Strasbourgian dictatorship might refuse to foot the bill, thereby proving itself less charitably inclined than those lucky British taxpayers to whom the People's Haystack once sold a non-existent bridge across the Thames.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Cavities ciii-cxiv

In another concentration camp, however, the Father of Teeth discovered a woman who sought to bear witness of all that she and her compatriots had suffered. Using a hairpin hidden from the guards, she scratched the dates of significant events into the skin of her arms and legs, so that whether her captivity ended in release to the world or resurrection before the Creator of the universe, she would be able to display the salient facts.

Attracted by the sound of splitting skin, the Father of Teeth wandered through the darkened barracks, where the prisoners lay shivering on wooden shelves, trying not to cough too hard in case they should be judged unfit for slavery and disposed of according to the Creator's eternal rule about sheep and goats. When the Father of Teeth passed by, the woman was jerked from uneasy sleep by the fragrance of his breath, which surpassed the normal barracks smell as the humble chlorine is surpassed by the most advanced and apocalyptic nerve gas. Her bare legs kicked out in agonised jactitation, and the Father of Teeth perused the chronicle with interest.

"Though this needlework is rough in quality, your efforts are commendable," he said at length; "however, you are quite mistaken to assume that certain facts will be salient for posterity merely because they happen to be salient for you. Three thousand years after the fact, does it worry you that some Amorites or Amalekites were unhappy?"
"Then I shall testify before the Eternal," hissed the chronicler.
"That's up to you, of course," said the Father of Teeth; "but either the Eternal does not know the facts of your testimony, in which case He is hardly worth informing; or else He has always known them, in which case His purpose in allowing your persecution is either good, evil or indifferent. If evil or indifferent, the truth will make no difference to Him; and if good you owe Him only gratitude for your moral improvement and your sense of personal significance in the greater cosmic scheme."
"There is such a scheme, then?" asked the woman, and her eyes shone in the dimness. "Something that will make our suffering worth while?"

The Father of Teeth winked at her, his dentures glittering. "Work brings freedom," he said.

Turbulence in the Tushery

Now that the Great War centenary rah-rah has died down a bit, we can of course look forward to a good deal of eightieth-anniversary rah-rah for round two. Given the Conservative Party's present mood, the rah-rah for the Battle of Britain, when Mr Churchill held off the might of the Luftwaffe with no help at all from either Hugh Dowding or some refugees from Europe, will doubtless be particularly edifying in its own quiet way. Nevertheless, the British Petroleum Museum has plans to commemorate a quite different anniversary, from a time so long ago that the royal family and even the English church were still interesting. The killing of a troublesome politician, as a result of high words during high tea before some over-zealous flunkeys, may or may not have resonances for the present day; certainly the Museum's parade of pageantry will be a good deal more glamorous than any which might have accompanied (to take a random example) a centenary remembrance of the chastisement of Cork by some zealous servants of Mr Churchill.

As with many events of particular Britishness, the aftermath of Becket's killing was briefly witnessed by the denizens of the nation's only time-travelling public house. This and other exploits have been chronicled in paperback and PDF for anyone prepared to brave the hangover.

Just Money

As one would expect of a mere expert, the retiring president of the Supreme Court has offered the crudest possible explanation for the current inadequacies of her profession. Rather than blaming immigrants, the beastly Euro-wogs or even Jeremy Corbyn, the metropolitan élitist Lady Hale sought to deflect the responsibility onto, of all things, the efficiency savings which have followed from the Osbornomic miracle. Hale particularly emphasised the impact on family law, where the proles' lack of access to legal services for their ordinary, everyday lives means that the ordinary, everyday lives of real people are completely unaffected, except possibly in the sense of paying less tax. Given the various wild oats which he himself has spaffed up the wall of family values during his long and salubrious career, it remains as yet unclear precisely what balance the People's Haystack hopes to achieve between abstract justice, political expediency and simple snout-in-trough self-interest.

Setting the Record Straight

Now that freedom from the Euro-wog yoke is a certainty, it is to be hoped that Britain will take due advantage of its liberty and give diplomatic support to Vladimir Putin's reaction against an EU resolution blaming the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact for contributing to the outbreak of the Second World War. Besides denouncing the antisemitism of the Second Polish Republic (a matter of historical fact, no matter how much the Conservatives' chumlies may deny it), Putin expressed full agreement with Winston Churchill's denunciation of the so-called appeasers: those British ministers who played for time while preparing the country for war as best they could, despite such obstacles as the unpopularity of re-armament and the blunder and bluster of one Winston Churchill. As an opponent of the beastly Nazi-Soviet empire of Brussels and a worthy successor to Churchill in historiography as in politics, the People's Haystack will undoubtedly sympathise.

Goodwill and a Sword

Appropriately enough, as this nasty little country belches and squabbles its way through another nasty little celebration of its nasty little state god, the latest episcopal appointee in the nasty little church of Timmy Farron and Theresa May has taken the opportunity to profundify upon the general nastiness. Rose Hudson-Wilkin, former chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Expenses Claimants, proclaimed that "all of us must take responsibility" for the present regrettable state of affairs, which is so self-evidently and equally the fault of Pharisees and publicans, Remainers and Leavers, immigrants and natives, racists and non-racists alike. Assuming that any of us is so far removed from British values as to require healing rather than victory, we can start by "making a commitment to ourselves and to each other to listen to one another and not just think that your view is the only view." Unfortunately, my view is the only view I can manage; which demonstrates my ocular inferiority to those Anglicans who can accommodate several beams in each eye. Refreshing as it is to be initiated into the ways of relativism by a self-proclaimed adherent of the goat-burning shepherd, I fear my materialist Old Adam rebels at being lectured on the perils of rhetoric by the woman whose words so recently contributed to making the lot of some rough sleepers just a little bit rougher.

Dirty Fighters

Entrepreneurial buccaneering is all very well of course; but like nepotism, knowledge and even nuclear weapons it can be dangerous in the wrong hands. In 2011 a revolution brought chaos to Libya, though Britain's leading liberal newspaper bashfully omits mention of Her Majesty's Government's enthusiastic contribution to the wog-bombing campaign, or indeed the People's Haystack's amusing pleasantries about the country's holiday-resort potential once the bodies had been cleared away. Anyway, despite all efforts at stabilising the region by the tried and tested democratic methods of dropping bombs on people and letting large corporations do the rest, it seems things remain a bit wobbly. As a result, Sudanese foreign fighters are apparently invading Libya despite being only Africans themselves; and some have compounded their atrocities by becoming involved in the people-trafficking business which, as we know, can all too frequently lead to the ultimate evil of migrancy. Clearly, much hand-wringing remains to be done.

Moderate Justice

Everyone who believes in the virtues of free, cantankerous and responsible journalism will be gratified and relieved at the head-chopping House of Saud's rapid and efficient solution of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The dissident journalist was killed in the Saudi consulate at Istanbul last October and his body has never been found; and as with the ongoing British-assisted slaughter in Yemen, the head-chopping House of Saud seems to have marked its own homework with near-perfect adherence to British values. Khashoggi has received a worthy monument in the fact that such figures as Crown Prince Mohammed and his former special adviser have been cleared of all wrongdoing as naturally and inevitably as if the inquiry had taken place in Britain.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Premolars clxxiv-clxxxiii

But almost immediately the Father of Teeth ran into a moderation custodian, and moseyed with him a while down the stained and echoing corridor.

"What bothers me most about this job," said the custodian, fumbling with his keys, "it isn't the sacrifices, you understand. Moderation and compassion are our watchwords here, even if there's a crisis on again. That isn't what bothers me at all."

At last he got the cell door open and the prisoner threw himself on his knees, The custodian drew his pistol and shot the prisoner neatly between the eyes. Despite the neatness, there was a certain amount of matter and splatter.

"It isn't even the untidiness that bothers me," said the custodian as he locked the door behind him. "I mean, I've asked time and again for the cell floors to be given a slope and a drain, just to make the cleaning-up easier, but I'm always told the budgeting isn't there. Because of the previous administration, you know. Too easy on the Other."
"There's a lot of it about," said the Father of Teeth.

The custodian opened the next door. The prisoner in this cell threw himself on his face, and the custodian had to step back before firing in order to keep the shine on his boots. "It's the mess that bothers me," he said. "I don't know if it's harder to scrub the blood off the floor or the grey matter off the walls, but after a month or two it can all get a bit demoralising, frankly."

He opened a third door, stepped in and fired. "Fiddly too, a lot of the time," he said. "It's amazing how far some of those skull fragments fly. They end up in places you wouldn't believe." Rattling the keys again, he shook his head. "Moderation and compassion are all very well, but you wonder sometimes if we couldn't do with a bit of extremism and callousness around here, just temporarily to move things along a bit."

"Anything to oblige," said the Father of Teeth, and as soon as the next shot was fired he pushed past the custodian and ground up the remains among his extra-strength mahogany molars. In a remarkably short time nothing remained of the cell's late occupant save the delicate olfactory trace of his gastro-intestinal tract's final testament, and that was quickly smothered by the Father of Teeth's belch.

Nevertheless, the custodian appeared less than impressed. "I'm sure you meant to help," he said stiffly, "but cannibalism is taking things too far."
"It wasn't cannibalism," said the Father of Teeth, jabbing at his gums with a bone splinter. "Still, it is true that, with a little imagination, you might save yourself some trouble and also relieve that food crisis we've heard so much about." The Father of Teeth exerted delicate leverage and something sprang from the horror of his gums and clattered resoundingly off the wall. "I say, you're right about those skull fragments."

But the custodian would have none of it, and before opening the next cell he firmly requested the Father of Teeth to refrain in future, no matter how compassionate his motives, from such immoderate demonstrations of efficiency.

Real People Forced into Migrant Swarms

Will the perfidy never end? Not content with having kept the mighty British entrepreneur grovelling beneath the yoke of free movement, nor with having exploited the bedrock decency of ordinary British people with umptillion waves of immigrants, the Euro-wogs are now apparently conspiring to deprive our newly-independent nation of its wealth creators. Hapless Conservative Party donors are being suckered into foreignness thanks to a greasy scheme by the quasi-Middle-Eastern island of Cyprus, whereby investors can purchase citizenship by owning property worth £1.7 million or more. This of course means that British wealth creators will continue to groan beneath the lash of Brusso-Strasbourgian beastliness, even as the ordinary British yeoman is empurpled amid the sunlit uplands of liberty. Fortunately, applicants are not obliged to soil themselves by setting toot on the island, whose dubious moral character should be amply apparent from the fact that its largest ethnic minority helped to spawn Boris Johnson, and its majority the Duke of Edinburgh.

Nice Weather For It

According to the mere experts at the Met Office, next year is likely to be one of the hottest since records began, demonstrating once more the indubitable fact that the risk of global catastrophe is not the British liberal media's idea of front-page news. As one would expect after the signing of the Paris agreement in 2015, annual carbon emissions have risen by a further four per cent. Fortunately, what with the British voter having plumped for the rah-rah of deregulation and shale-fracking over the misery of industrial reconfiguration and all those bloody trees, things are certain to continue getting balmier.

Developing Darkie Deservingness

Barely has the Imperial Haystack's planned Rah-Rah Decade begun, and already various do-gooding malcontents are voicing their treacherous qualms. The Haystack has long believed that the Government's ministry for international aid should be a good deal less focused on spaffing aid up the internationals, and wants to shake things up a bit by feeding the Department of International Aid to the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns. This would free the DfID from its unprofitable focus on health, sanitation and teaching piccaninny fillies ideas above their station; which would in turn enable the aid budget to be targeted at selling land mines and mercenaries. Mere experts have warned that turning Whitehall upside-down amidst a flurry of summits on the climate crisis might not make for the best use of the Government's time and personnel; fortunately, the Government does not care about the climate crisis. Anyway, a Conservative member of the international development committee says that Boris has wanted to do it for a long time, so that settles that.

Statesmanlike Banter

Some ill-mannered posturing by the president of Turkey has caused a more than usually charming outbreak of historical euphemism in the British press. Annoyed by a US Senate vote in favour of recognising the Ottoman Empire's crimes in Armenia as genocide, Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to retaliate by slapping the same uncomplimentary label on the workings of Manifest Destiny. The native American peoples were devastated by the effects of European diseases, unto which the invaders' God had considerately omitted to provide the heathen with immunity. Additionally, as the Independent coyly hints, "war, slavery and displacement also contributed to the decline of indigenous populations," apparently without any particular ill-feeling from anyone. much as war, slavery, displacement and the Press contributed to the decline of European Jewry towards the middle of the last century.

Whose Heritage Is It Anyway?

Thanks to the perfidious French, Britain may suffer international pressure to return various tokens of recompense for having civilised the lesser breeds. President Macron pledged to hand back artefacts looted from Benin and, in yet another demonstration of how far adrift Continental morals are from the mainland, it appears that the pledge may actually be carried out. Although Nigeria has hinted that it might consent to be loaned its own property, Britain has been subjected to bullying by mighty Ethiopia, while the perfidious Greeks have continued their long-running campaign to snatch back Lord Elgin's marbles. As the ambassador to Greece's oppressors at the time, Elgin filched the marbles from the Parthenon and then sold them to the British government: an act of national honour roughly equivalent to sending Lord Rothermere for a toddle through the Louvre in 1940 with Goebbels' blessing and a nice big trolley, and then allowing the British taxpayer to pay him for the takings.

Heavy Laden

Among the manifold burdens of saintliness, as both Tumbledown Tessie and the Reverend Blair will testify given half a chance, perhaps the most burdensome of all is a painfully increased sensitivity to the faults of others. It is clearly in this improving spirit that the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom the Independent rather charitably calls a religious leader, has had a bit of a seasonal simper about the state of the nation. Contrary to the teachings of his Saviour, a blood-and-thunder fanatic whose very name is a glorification of ethnic cleansing, the Archbishop expressed concern at the rise of intolerance towards minorities; which no doubt explains why he recently joined the chief rabbi in slandering the only national political leader whose career has been spent opposing racism rather than facilitating it. The Archbishop is also worried about the rising numbers of rough sleepers, who apparently are insufficiently grateful for the mildness of their sufferings as compared with those of the Royal Family. So exercised is the Archbishop on this dereliction of humanity that he took to the pages of the Big Issue in order to shake the homeless out of their self-pity. The Royal Family serve "what is literally, for them, a life sentence" under the crushing burden of their worldly goods; and the weight of their duty is only increased by the fact that members of the Royal Family tend to live considerably longer than rough sleepers. On top of all this, they are denounced and excoriated for consorting with the occasional paedophile: a martyrdom rather similar to that of certain churches one could name. It's hardly surprising that the Archbishop is a tad concerned about our moral direction, even if he admits that we have not yet reached a crisis point: Lambeth Palace is unlikely to be requisitioned for the poor.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: II Caries xxxiv-xlvii

Later, however, the Father of Teeth found himself wandering a concentration camp, whose inmates were systematically starved in order to cure their laziness. For their own survival they were forced to betray one another, since the death of one meant slightly better rations for the rest, in accordance with the eternal laws of supply and demand.

The Father of Teeth came upon a woman whose husband had been rationalised into the gas chambers months before and whose children had since died of malnutrition. She herself had survived by selling her favours to the guards for bread and telling tales about her fellow inmates; but last week a fresh intake of idlers had arrived and the guards had their pick of less bony meat. The tales she told had never really made much difference, as the punishments in the camp were deliberately patterned after those inflicted by the Creator upon His works, and were therefore completely arbitrary.

Sensing her weakness, the woman's fellow inmates had called her out as an informer and set upon her severely. She lay expiring, and the Father of Teeth felt moved to dispense some honest consolation. "In fifty years from now, my child," he said, "an optimist will have decided that all of this was worth while; and in a hundred years it will all be forgotten, or the memory blurred and distorted beyond recognition."

Those who ran the camp were hygienic and fastidious, so he had inserted his whitest fangs. In her dying eyes, his grin was a luminous tunnel. "If you are forgiving, my child" he said, "take comfort: future generations will not suffer from your pain. If you are vengeful, take heart: neither will they learn."

Mission Slightly Less Accomplished Than We Had Been Led to Believe Shock

Britain's leading liberal newspaper has just discovered that the war in Afghanistan was a bit of a fiasco, primarily because the Americans have just discovered it for themselves. Like the Soviets before them, but self-evidently unlike the British Empire, the US and its allies came badly unstuck through hubris and ignorance, while occasionally going to the lengths of giving misleading information to government stenographers in the free and cantankerous media. Meanwhile, the war aims appeared ill-defined and shifting to anyone self-deluded enough to imagine that wog-bombing isn't and end in itself. For that lucky generation which lived through the glorious War on Terror, it will come as little surprise that the chimpanzee then occupying the White House did not know what "winning" meant; but it seems a little strange that so many non-journalists have managed to miss the point. Wars on abstract nouns are not meant to be won; they are meant to continue indefinitely and make profits for all the right people.

Rah

Capitalist democracy is essentially advertising; unregulated advertising is essentially lying and cheating. It is absurd to claim, as various hand-wringing liberal types have been claiming since ten o'clock last night, that the canaille have chosen to sell the NHS to Donald Trump. The Conservatives have been voted in because Johnson and his gang have promised to sort out Brexit and then get along with sorting out everything else. This sounds eminently reasonable to anyone who doesn't pay much attention to politics, being more concerned with such day-to-day problems as scraping a living and looking after vulnerable loved ones, which the Conservatives have spent the past decade so considerately exacerbating. The canaille would probably be quite happy to retain the NHS, but they have voted for its final destruction because the people who run Britain's political advertising regulation are essentially those who run the Johnson gang.

For the same reason, it is also absurd for the hand-wringers to claim that Labour's policies would totally have got a fair hearing under a less hopeless leader. Anyone making the slightest suggestion of taking from the rich to give to the poor, or refusing to wog-bomb wherever the chance presents itself, or keeping the planet more or less habitable, is liable to face exactly the same ridicule and misrepresentation that was meted out to Corbyn, and to the far more timid Miliband before him.

It remains to be seen whether the Johnson gang will try to maintain some sort of one-nation façade and throw some money around for a bit, or plump straight for the Singapore-on-Thames economy which powers the dank dreams of the Europhobes. The more optimistic electoral psychologists are already predicting that whatever happens will at least be "owned" by the Conservatives, as though the Johnson gang and their cheerleaders are going to step up manfully and take the blame for failing to inform their dupes that Brexit will be far from "done" once the withdrawal agreement is passed. Self-evidently, whatever delay and damage occurs will be the fault of the poor, the sick, the migrants, the Muslims, the citizens of nowhere, the pessimists, the Euro-wogs in Brussels, the last Labour government, and quite possibly the right kind of Jew.

Meanwhile, one must take what booby prizes one can. Much fun presumably awaits the Conservative and Unionist Party when its policies start breaking up the United Kingdom for real. The ridiculous little racist Zac Goldsmith lost his seat, as did the vicious Caroline Flint, albeit to a Conservative who presumably shares her principles. The ex-Deputy Conservatives helped their masters to win several seats, notably the greasy little opportunist Sam Gyimah who handed Kensington back to his fellow Grenfell-burners; but after a strikingly dishonest and inanely posturing campaign Jo Swinson became the latest Deputy Conservative leader to lose their seat. Doubtless a profitable career at Facebook awaits.

Moral Force

Plucky little Britain is once more defying the mighty oppression of international woggery by funding a famous British invention for the improvement of lesser breeds. The modern concentration camp has been adopted by several proud nations seeking to take back control and get things done; and in Burma, or Myanmar as the natives foppishly call it, British money is being used to give some local Muslims a good hard lesson in entrepreneurial values. The United Nations has adopted a policy of restricting aid to "life-saving assistance", but from the days of New Labour until now Her Majesty's Government has never shown much interest in saving the lives of Muslims and continues to throw money at Gordon Brown's morally-compassed heroine and her brave little soldiers. Complaints of "apartheid-like" conditions will serve only to augment Britain's pride in its entrepreneurial ingenuity at keeping the beastly Boers in line; and as grateful employers of those honest G4S people, Britain's taxpayers will be happy to know that Her Majesty's Government does not bother to distinguish between camps which have been closed and those which are still in operation.

Squeezed Out

Breeders who persist in their disgusting hobby even in the face of present conditions will inflict slightly worse lives upon their offspring than those suffered by themselves or their own parental tormentors, according to the Office for National Statistics. Expectations of healthy life in Britain have been in decline for the past seven years; which, by sheer coincidence, just happens to be when the Bullingdon Club and its little yellow enablers forced through the Health and Social Care Act, a major stage in the sensible-centrist generation's ongoing vandalism of the National Health Service. There is also substantial inequality between life expectancies of people born in areas inhabited by hard-working families and those infested with scroungers and shirkers; and it remains unclear whether the ONS has taken sufficient account of the effects of climate change. Thanks to the effects of boiling, drowning, disease, starvation and the violence that will result from social collapse, the problem of healthy living during their golden years is likely, for many if not most brand-new Britons, to be somewhat academic.

Too Much Black and Not Enough British

Having once supported the creation of a Hyde Park monument to the victims of Britain's slave trade, perhaps because he was unaware that the victims were largely non-white, Boris Johnson has unsurprisingly decided not to bother after all. Her Majesty's Government is happy to sponsor memorials to the world wars because rah rah, and to the Holocaust because look what the beastly foreigners did, and to the Srebrenica massacre because both of the above; Her Majesty's Government is equally happy to make pious noises about modern-day slavery because it conflates so conveniently with migrant hordes and swarming cockroaches; but a statue memorialising the Atlantic human resources transfer might clash with all our other statues of those great Britons who profited from it. A spokesbeing suggested that anyone with an interest in such obscure by-ways of ancient history might care to pay a visit to the provinces, where genuine British values tend to be a little more dilute.

Holy Homicidal Wetbacks

A church in California has blasphemed the Christian message by displaying an installation showing the Holy Family as refugees. Predictably, there have been objections on the grounds that modern immigrants murder people, quite unlike the Saviour who committed genocide only in His heart. The installation is apparently based on a bizarre misreading of Matthew 25 xxxv, which finds Jesus bragging about the rewards awaiting those sheep who pay tithes to His church and the punishments awaiting those goats who do not. Far from "thank[ing] those who fed him when he was a hungry refugee fleeing Bethlehem", Jesus preached a violently exclusionary form of fundamentalist Judaism and seems to have taken a certain pride in His Old Testament namesake's conferring of refugee status upon the Canaanite dogs. Famously, Jesus' earthly parents were warned to flee to Egypt in anticipation of King Herod's precautionary massacre of Hebrew infants; in His infinite mercy, the Saviour's Father in heaven did not see fit to warn any other parents, but sat complacently by while Herod did his worst. Possibly the Jews were being punished in advance for choosing Barabbas; or perhaps God simply had better things to do than worry about women who lacked the foresight to get themselves knocked up by the Holy Spirit.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Dentures xciii-cxvii

On the contrary, before his extraction from office the Father of Teeth was entrusted by the Creator of the universe with all manner of tasks. Some were menial, such as the ventilation of throats which did not praise the Creator loudly enough; and some were not so menial, such as the biting into shape of various geological formations. His most delicate task was placing souls into human blastocysts, for then the Father of Teeth had to chew his way into a tiny clump of cells using only his most delicate diamond-sharp dentures. With tweezers he would extract the squirming soul from its angrily buzzing capsule and then push it into the cavity, and all the while the cells would continue to divide and multiply, as mindlessly as if the whole process were a purely physical phenomenon which had evolved through a series of accidents.

Strictly speaking the Father of Teeth was required to insert the souls at the moment of conception, but there were so many conceptions that he could never get the timing exactly right and generally contented himself with completing the operation when the blastocyst comprised something between sixteen and 65,536 cells. Even this relaxed timetable was barely satisfactory, as the souls were all well aware that they were destined for reunion with the Creator of the universe and, truth to tell, were often in no great hurry to avail themselves of the privilege. Such was their sense of anticipation that they would scream all the way to the womb, and occasionally the Father of Teeth would become so distracted as to leave one of his most delicate diamond-sharp dentures embedded among the cells; whereupon the foetus, having reached a certain amphibious stage of development, would gnaw its way outside in a most inconvenient and untidy fashion.

Managerial reconsiderations were clearly called for, and the Creator of the universe eventually decided that ensoulment should occur at a later stage of growth. Eventually the matter was placed in the hands of a committee, with the inevitable result that the majority of the world's blastocysts were never ensouled at all, but divided and multiplied with mechanical regularity until they became big enough to walk the earth. Eventually, in compensation for their spiritual vacuity, they started gathering together in little clumps to chorus their demands at the Creator. Of course the Creator heard nothing of these prayers, since the petitioners had not been ensouled and were therefore unworthy; but often in his wanderings the Father of Teeth would observe them, and snigger at them with his most delicate diamond-sharp dentures.

Spicy Pork Special

Among the less explored paradoxes of taking back control is the Government's eagerness to sell off British assets to beastly foreigners; and in many cases not even to fellow buccaneering entrepreneurs, but to state-owned monoliths among the perfidious French and the Heathen Chinee. One possible explanation for the latter's favoured status has emerged with the news that Heathen Chinee scientists have been breeding suitable love partners for Conservative members. It is true that the monkey-pig hybrids died within a week of becoming sexually available; but dead sex-objects don't whine to be fed, clothed and housed in return for their labour, or go tale-tattling to the scandal sheets when a chap decides to spaff his wild oats up a different mucous membrane. Typically for state-owned human resources, and true to their sinister, inscrutable Heathen Chinee ways, the scientists themselves claim to have bred the hybrids in the interests of mere public health, since so few dead people are inclined to donate their organs for transplant unless there is something in it for them.

More British Meat for the Grinder

Record numbers of people involved in breeding new Britons are old enough to know better. Parenthood is at best a morally dubious proposition; given the likely quality of life amid the consequences of runaway climate change, the creation of more pain-sentient minds at this point is nothing short of criminally insane. The attitude of the Conservatives and their little yellow enablers to the mentally ill is tolerably well known, so it should come as no surprise that resources have been cut (thirty-three new midwives in England this year, against a shortfall of two and a half thousand) and that the punishment meted out to mothers in the country's scrounging and shirking areas is statistically somewhat greater than among hard-working families.

Borderline Genius

Although the fall of the Soviet Union made Russia a playground for plucky little entrepreneurs, the authoritarian tendencies of the well-known election winner Vladimir Putin have led to something of a freeze on British values. This no doubt explains why the beastly Russians have arrested an enterprising gentleman who erected his own border near Finland and charged illegal immigrants for the privilege of being led across it. Much like those swashbuckling Libyan businesspersons who have flourished in the wake of the 2011 wog-bombing, he promised "work and a better life" in Europe, and even brought along an inflatable boat just in case. The Russian authorities are taking a dim view of the matter, but it is to be hoped that Whitehall's Department for Exiting the Shackles of Euro-woggery will take note, and perhaps even have a whip-round to bribe a kindred spirit out of jail. Given that we may well spend the next few years drawing various imaginary lines in the Irish Sea, it would be just as well to have someone around who can make them profitable.

The Handmaid's Tale One and the Other One

The BBC has apologised for "the offence caused" by a report on its news channel which referred to a Booker Prize winner as "another author". The prize was divided between Margaret Atwood for her cash-in on a popular television series, and Bernadine Evaristo, who has one of those piccaninny names that might so easily cause offence among Conservative Party members. What the BBC did not apologise for was the fact that its reporter was apparently not very well acquainted with the issue on which he was supposedly informing the public; which is, after all, merely the job for which the public pays him. Fortunately, nobody in the Conservative Party is likely to be very offended about that.

Labour's Mote and Lambeth's Beam

Other than the Conservative Party and our free and cantankerous Press, the British institution best qualified to comment on prejudice is undoubtedly the one that has spent much of the past few decades contorting itself into ever more complicated knots over whether women and homosexuals might qualify as fully human. As a leader of the spiritual community whose founding documents include a quartet of increasingly violent anti-Jewish screeds and whose record of intolerance is second to none in history, the Archbishop of Canterbury last week continued his endless crusade for headlines by endorsing Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis' attack on Labour in the Murdoch Times. Apparently under the impression that the spiritual leader of Britain's Orthodox synagogues is some sort of Archbishop of Jewry, Britain's most over-promoted trendy vicar hurried to tout "British values" as opposed to racist exclusionism, thereby provoking a genuine anti-racism campaigner to walk out of the church's charmingly-named committee for minority ethnic Anglican concerns. Gus John, an academic with some little history of serving sanctimonious hypocrites their own arses, cited "discrimination and exclusion, benign and sugar-coated or otherwise, at every level of organisation in the church" and was even tactless enough to mention the hostile environment policy of Justin Welby's sister in Christ, Theresa May.

Available Now

My novel Ringmaster Grin is now available as a paperback or a PDF ebook. That superb cover photograph is by Giovanna Ceroni, who provided sinister illumination for Providence Fell and suggestive shade for Shadows With Claws. Ringmaster Grin is a nightmare with jokes and journalists, and should be purchased, read, reviewed and recommended with all possible alacrity.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: I Pulp cliii-clxi

When the Father of Teeth returned, however, the civil war was over and they were busy digging for the great traitor's bones. Amid the devastated buildings and the unpatriotic screams of the wounded, the bereaved and the starving, soldiers of the legitimate government were recruiting expendables to help demolish the tomb. The great traitor had committed the unpardonable outrage of dying in private from natural causes before he could be publicly tried, humiliated and executed, so in the interests of national unity the legitimate Life President had turned the desecration of his grave into an uplifting cultural event.

The Father of Teeth joined a line of crunchy refugees and gnawed his way gradually up the queue. The soldiers watched with equanimity, for they knew that the virtuous dead would be resurrected on the day of judgement and would enter into an eternal bliss made all the more piquant by the thought of their less deserving compatriots shrieking in eternal flame. Besides, there were many shortages, so the fewer refugees the better for all concerned.

At last the Father of Teeth reached the great traitor's tomb, where the demolition crews had just about finished their work. The last few expendables were being prodded inside to neutralise the last few booby-traps, and the legitimate Life President and his spiritual advisers were making ready for the ceremonial exhumation and desecration of the corpse.

"What's all this in aid of, then?" demanded the Father of Teeth. "Why all this messing about in the dust?"
"The great traitor will be scattered to the winds and sunk in the waters," they said, "for in this way he will not be resurrected on the day of judgement, and will be denied all chance of eternal life."
"Well, what if I chew him up a bit?" offered the Father of Teeth. "His dust will get all mixed up with the crunchy refugees, which ought to make for a difficult resurrection all round, and even in the best of circumstances my digestive tract isn't the most merciful environment to await the end of time."

The legitimate Life President and his spiritual advisers were still discussing this proposition when the last stones were shattered, the last booby-traps closed upon the precautionary expendables, and the great traitor's tomb fell open for all to see. Alas, there was nothing in the coffin except a great hole through the bottom, leading into a long-collapsed tunnel which had once led who knew where. The great traitor had faked his own death and then dug his way out on the sly, and there was nothing for it but to resurrect the civil war in order to give the nation a satisfactory sense of closure.

The soldiers and refugees all cheered when they heard the news, because the job opportunities would be considerable, and before sneaking out through the tunnel a second time the Father of Teeth started a rumour that the whole business with the tomb had been a vast conspiracy and the great traitor unjustly maligned.