Slanderous Optimism

Difficult as it may be to believe given the robust state of reality around all matters concerning the US presidential election, it eppears that one of the candidates may have said the thing that is not. Among the more recent excretions of the head-tribble which were subsequently flatulated forth from the Trumpster's upper speechification sphincter was a pledge to protect women whether they like it or not: evidently by the usual method of subordinating their rights to the requirements of insensate cellular agglomerations, both those still resident in the uterus and those that should never have left it alive. The Trumpster's opponent opined that this chivalrous eructation was "offensive to everybody:" a blatant and presumably deliberate falsehood, since it is patently not offensive to Christian nationalists, Christian conservatives, Christian fundamentalists or Christian fascists. While the offence-taking capacities of such people are indubitably impressive, exceeding Matter in variety and rivalling Mind in futility, they do not stretch to moral indignation at limiting or abolishing the rights of women. Nor did Harris remain content with promulgating one dastardly deception. Owing no doubt to her own womanly predilections, she compounded the calumny against the Trumpster, his head-tribble and Baby Jesus by stating outright that the former president, of all things, "thinks about women and their agency."

Are There No Carrier Pigeons?

Private sector efficiency has made itself felt in the provinces, where testimony from a rail company operating somewhere north of Westminster has made an extraordinary committee meeting slightly more extraordinary than was anticipated. Asked about the latest round of delays and cancellations, company officials admitted, in the course of whining that something might be done eventually given sufficient time and incentive, that communications with the expendables who crew their trains are still reliant on fax machines. For readers below a certain age, fax machines were a primitive species of telecommunications device which combined the convenience of a non-mobile telephone with the efficiency of a Steam Age inkjet printer, and which were standard in offices about the time the whining interregnum John Major split up the national railway network and sold it off piecemeal some three decades ago. Apparently any change to digital technology would involve coming to some arrangement with the unions, which is clearly unreasonable; while tree-hugging woke legalism has thus far prevented our public transport élite from having their messages taken back and forth in cleft sticks.

Decisive Action

After only a little more than a year of ethnic cleansing and international aggression, and civilian casualties barely in excess of forty thousand lives, one or two bastions of the free world are beginning to wonder if perhaps the Righteous State might be overdoing things a bit, and whether it might perhaps be well advised to ease off a little for its own good. A flunkey for Team Starmer even went so far as to fret that Israel's reputation as a democracy could suffer, which would not be in Israel's interests and would therefore be a Very Bad Thing. We are all aware that the Righteous State's sacred right to self-defence trumps all considerations of international law; but the Knesset's vote to blacklist the main relief agency immediarely after a Team Starmer flunkey warned against it has caused some countries to consider the possibility of subjecting trade ties to review, or even of issuing notice that one or two wrists may be slapped should the situation be allowed to deteriorate unacceptably further. Let nobody say the world sat back and did nothing.

Money Isn't Everything

As has been demonstrated by the vote for independence from the beastly Euro-wogs, and the continuing disinclination to resume even a modified market share of the Strasbrussels yoke, there are few financial sacrifices the great British nation will not make on a point of principle. This precious cultural virtue is once more apparent in a report which observes that £19,000 million in economic growth is being lost through lack of social mobility. The lower orders are finding it increasingly difficult to avail themselves of university education, while apprenticeships remain under-funded so as not to promote laziness; hence people from less wealthy backgrounds are earning thousands a year less than hard-working families and are correspondingly less likely to sully decent neighbourhoods by crawling too high on the property ladder. Strangely enough, the compilers of the report seem to think there is something in this situation that ought to be changed. The country that voted to knock half a dozen percentage points off its GDP in order to show Johnny Foreigner what's what is hardly likely to begrudge a few thousands of millions to keep the rabble in their place.

Legally Healthy

Just as there are still media workers who persuade themselves that the operative word in capitalist journalism is journalism, it appears there are still health workers who delude themselves that the operative word in capitalist healthcare is healthcare. Victims of this warped perspective have signed an open letter to the General Medical Council protesting the suspension of health professionals over convictions for non-violent climate activism. So uncontroversial is the issue that the ludicrous Rowan Williams, whose tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury showed him neither courageous nor principled even by the famously undemanding standards of the Anglican church, was able to summon up sufficient dorsal ossification to place himself among the signatories. Fortunately the minister for natural profiteering has already clarified, in response to concerns raised by the UN special rapporteur, that the law allows for environmental protest and public engagement insofar as such activities are legitimate; which is as much as to say that the law permits what is legally permissible and that what is permissible under law may legally be permitted.

Cheap Spirits

He loves you and He needs money!
George Carlin

Executives at the French branch of Vatican Incorporated are aflame with moral indignation at proposals to charge an entry fee at the restored Notre Dame cathedral. With so much of the Church's worldly treasure bound up in defending its sex abusers, and the Almighty as helpful as ever, many of the country's religious buildings have fallen into secular disrepair. Even so, the Catholic church in France vehemently opposes the idea that filthy lucre should enter into the tourist industry, and the law specifies that visits to churches cannot be subject to payment. Religious institutions elsewhere in Europe routinely require visitors to pay; in our own nation of shopkeepers, the privilege of entry to St Paul's Cathedral costs six times the proposed amount for Notre Dame. Even in France, once the threshold of God's house has been freely crossed the messengers of Christ are at liberty to impose whatever tariffs they see fit on visits to the rooms inside.

Too Big to Call

Newspapers owned by two of the Trumpster's fellow squillionaires have decided that the choice between business as usual and out-and-out fascism is just too damn difficult. Both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have announced that they will not be endorsing either candidate in the presidential election: a decision all the more courageous in that the Trumpster and his head-tribble are unlikely to view non-endorsement any more favourably than they would view endorsement of the enemy within. Staff on the papers have reacted with shock and dismay, as is only natural for a profession whose critical faculties are sufficiently refined never to observe which element comes first in either capitalist journalism or capitalist democracy.

Ahead of His Time

Some little time ago in this Mother of Democracies, a by-election was held in which both candidates came from the same inordinately privileged class of society, and in which the only genuine power among the lower classes was exerted by property owners. A close result led the loser to believe he was in with a chance of deposing his rival, and among the contested votes was that of an alehouse landlord who happened to be one of London's estimated ten thousand black people. No sooner had the man proved his status as a rate-payer than his rights were further questioned, this time on the grounds that he was a blackamoor, either born outside the country or else nothing better than a servant. Later in life he contracted a fever and was compelled to join a government-sponsored forced labour programme. According to Britain's leading liberal newspaper, all this "changes our understanding of British history," presumably because no previous century had hitherto been thought capable of so moderate and sensible a chain of circumstances.

Punitive Democracy

Good old colonial values are alive and well in Australia, where the leader of the charmingly misnamed Liberal party has urged stiffer wog control measures for uppity aboriginals. An independent senator used the occasion of a parliamentary reception to heckle the king over Britain's treatment of the lesser breeds, and in the process apparently permitted her diplomatic tact to be outweighed by, of all things, historical accuracy. In the view of the Liberal leader, current parliamentary sanctions are insufficient to spare statesbeings of the calibre of Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos Jr and United States chimpanzee George W Bush from undeserved embarrassment. Equally to the peril of free speech and civilised values, there is a risk that disorderly senators might gain further publicity for their disreputable causes should they be permitted too much opportunity to explain or defend their actions. Fortunately, now that the Sovereign has laid an appropriate groundwork of goodwill Team Starmer will no doubt stand ready to reap the market benefits for British exports of tar and feathers.

Home Office Cute

In keeping with Team Starmer's juvenile domestic policy (someone maxed out Auntie Rachel's credit card, and that's why jolly Uncle Wes is brandishing that hypodermic) and infantile foreign policy (bad Vlad and blue-eyed Bibi, and no, you still can't go out and play with the Brussels children), the Ministry for Wog Disposal has demonstrated a new approach to beastly migrants by issuing a passport to a character from children's literature. As a propaganda move, this may be less openly thuggish than the Trumpster campaign's co-opting of works by various unconsulted popular musicians; but no doubt the intention is similar. Besides being fictitious, an advantage he shares with thousands if not millions of sexually insatiable criminal darkies, Paddington Bear is notably a CGI character in some financially successful films. As breathlessly noted in Britain's leading liberal newspaper, the screen depiction of a talking anthropomorphic bear requires some degree of fakery (they didn't even need the real passport!), and Team Starmer has always been as happy to sponsor the illusory as it is to put out for the profitable.

Index Texpurgatorius

Although the Christian state of Texas has been zealous in the crusade to keep young readers pure for Jesus, in the seventeen months before last December the realm of Ronald of the Saints banned more than three times as many books. Citzens of Montgomery County have descended to the challenge in a fashion well worthy of the Trumpster and his head-tribble, by classifying unwelcome facts as fiction. Penguin Random House has issued a series of books for young people, which treats of America's gruesome dealings with the lesser breeds under the provoking rubric Race to the Truth. A "citizens' review panel," which hardly sounds Stalinist at all, decided to bypass the judgement of pesky librarians, and to broaden the local censorshup régime from the sexually explicit to the historically subversive by designating one of the volumes as fiction rather than non-fiction. A petition to reverse the classification has collected thirty-four thousand signatures, the names of those soon to be unpersons doubtless predominating.

Big Pharma's Team Starmer

Our first hundred-odd days of tough decisions for working people have been graced with two notable schemes for saving the NHS. One is the deployment of "advisers" to chivvy sufferers of severe mental health problems into gainful employment. The other is the initiative whereby people who are overweight and unemployed will be injected with drugs. Dr Wesley "Slimline" Streeting has now assured a grateful nation that fatty-jabbing is unlikely to reach dystopian levels within the current parliament, as he does not wish to create a dependency culture. He also acknowledged that drugs are not a substitute for good nutrition and exercise, or at any rate not so efficient a substitute as nagging and bullying the poor and the vulnerable. Meanwhile, the world's biggest pharmaceutical company has been requested to carry out real-world trials into the effectiveness of its own merchandise, which certainly ought to clarify matters.

Past Glories

Following its recent near-reset of Conservative policy vis à vis the beastly Euro-wogs, Team Starmer is set for further diplomatic triumphs in the Caribbean, where the master race will neither apologise for its role in the transatlantic slave trade nor deign to discuss the issue of reparations. This means that Team Starmer is taking a more robustly Imperialist position than either the king, who has gone about as far as he can without a ministerial sign-off, or the Church of England, which has undertaken to pass around the plate for conscience-money rather than sacrifice anything it already owns. The Minister for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets, who in opposition identified himself as a Caribbean person and proclaimed that "we don’t just want to hear an apology, we want reparations," has modified (in Standard English, reversed) his position in light of the need to support a ceasefire in the Middle East, shame the Heathen Chinee, and drive growth across his economy.

Quite Traumatic

Conservative politicians have long been known for loving not wisely but too well, and the helpmeat of a West Northamptonshire councillor has done her part in continuing this charming sentimental tradition. Birmingham crown court jailed her for thirty-one months over an online post calling for mass deportations of asylum seekers and burning of wog warehouses after last summer's atrocity in Southport. Since her little indiscretion was not explicitly directed against the people of Gaza, it constituted an attempt to stir up racial hatred rather than a call for ceasefire, and the perpetrator is expected to be back on the streets in less than a year and a half. Righteous indignation from Conservatives over the leniency of the sentence has not been conspicuously forthcoming.

The Plastic Priest

In previous works Nicole Cushing has provided spectacular visions of the Pit ("The Orchard of Hanging Trees", The Sadist's Bible) and blackly humorous accounts of depression and depersonalisation in Trumpsterland (A Sick Gray Laugh, Mothwoman). In this novella, psychological and religious themes are combined with deadpan panache in the story of the spiritual crisis afflicting an Episcopalian priest.

As a fifty-pushing female cleric in Owlingsville, a Midwestern small town "of median angst and arithmetically mean fortunes," the Reverend Heather Kaye Ford is off to an authentically unpromising start. Her never very enthusiastic congregation has been thinned by the pandemic and is leaking parishioners to the local megachurch; her vaguely liberal ways are viewed with indifference or suspicion in a town which has purged the bird of wisdom from its name by altering the pronunciation of the first syllable; and her vocation, while genuine enough as far as it goes, is not enough to sustain her against the maddening idiocy of the everyday. While the breaking of the magic wafer still inspires to some extent, Kaye is increasingly aware that she is really just another working stiff in a dead-end job, and that she stays in the job largely because leaving it would be too much trouble and would precipitate a humiliating parental I told you so.

When she tries to take just enough of the initiative by holding an informal prayer meeting in the park, the inevitable washout is accompanied by an ambiguous sign. The single other communicant claims several identities in turn, the last and most troubling of which serves to bring Kaye's crisis to a head. It remains unclear exactly to what extent the head in question is her own, especially as we never learn who is telling Kaye's story. The narrative mood is a fine third-person sardonic, but an I drops in a couple of times without deigning to declare itself further. Perhaps this voice belongs to an outside observer; perhaps it is Kaye's own demonstration of her new-found mystical detachment, which leads her at last to a state of being appropriate to the current reality.

The paperback edition from Cemetery Dance is nicely presented and properly copy-edited; although, appropriately enough, the last sentence of the author biography at the end says that The Plastic Priest is yet to be released.

Nefarious Ends

As befits a Christian, his grace the Archbishop of Canterbury has come out against the legalisation of assisted dying. He came out in the Rothermere Daily Stürmer, which should certainly put paid to any perception of his church as a social club for gay-baiters, blue-rinsers and myth-mongers; and as befits a Christian, he worried that any attempt to ease the pain and suffering which God has seen fit to inflict might place us on a slippery slope towards a duty to die, as in "every other place where it's been done." As befits a Christian, his grace did not deign to cite evidence, and was contradicted by the sponsor of the proposed legislation who, as befits a member of Team Starmer's parliamentary Labour Party, has huge amounts of respect for people who say things that aren't true. The bill has not yet been published, but there is still some doubt as to whether it will cover those who wish to end their suffering without being terminally ill; and, as befits a Christian, his grace will doubtless take comfort from that.

From the River to the South China Sea

Ethnic cleansing is all very well provided that it's done by the nice people; but even the most sensible and moderate of observers would be hard put to deny that it can still cause a bit of inconvenience here and there. Despite the continuing good health of the arms trade, concerns had begun to emerge that the current Israeli rampage might adversely affect the market in fossil fuels; fortunately, the Netanyahoo has now proffered his word as a gentleman and a humanitarian that the Righteous State has no plans to target petroleum as well as people. Nevertheless, oil prices continue to fall thanks to electric vehicles and an insidious reduction in demand from the Heathen Chinee, so that "in the absence of a major disruption" there will be a surplus on the market next year. Happily for the fossil fuel profiteers, there is as yet little indication that the Righteous State will be satisfied with a mere final solution to the Arab and Persian Untermenschen, and still less sign that it will so far compromise its sacred right of self-defence as to allow its borders to terminate anywhere west of Tibet.

Welfare Gone Mental

In the good old days, mental health conditions and neurodiversity and all that sort of thing were dealt with Britishly and on an individual level by working hard, playing by the rules and being economically active. Nowadays the freak or loony next door is whooping it up on benefits and getting more nice things than you are, and this is a Bad Thing. Such is the stuff of reasoned debate in the Conservative leadership contest, wherein the non-male, non-white candidate is straining to prove her ideological worth by endorsing a thirty-six page denunciation of the "economic advantages and protections" from which the neurodiverse are deriving such ruthless advantage. At least one Conservative from the hypocritical wing, who once wrote a report on how autistic people might more efficiently be chivvied into making money for the rich, has expressed concern at the essay's conflation of loonies with freaks, when in fact they fall into separate categories and require different modes of bullying to get the best results.

Special Means Special

Although Team Starmer has repeatedly proclaimed that it wishes to reset relations with the beastly Euro-wogs to the extent of toning down the rah-rah as much as Conservative policy will allow, it seems that not everyone on the Continent has yet appreciated the mainland's position in all its crystalline clarity. An Italian MEP recently elected to the unenviable position of chairing the EU-UK parliamentary partnership assembly has demanded, if you please, that the master race should limit its options by defining what it requires from the lesser breeds. This is of course a typical case of Brusso-Strasbourg insensitivity towards the need for His Majesty's Government to face all ways at once provided its own face turns right. Nevertheless, one or two green shoots of realism did make an appearance; notably the recognition that His Majesty's Government is "an unavoidable partner" in the matter of wog-bombing, and that therefore some sort of special relationship is called for. Whether the beastly Euro-wogs are ready to assume the position of favourite ally in such a relationship while Britain plays mini-Murca remains as yet unclear.

Il Barbaro di Siviglia

Some bits and pieces in Seville have been confirmed as the remains of a migrant whose lawless and immoral ways brought disaster to both the American people and his own. His arrival in the US sphere of influence resulted directly in a great replacement of native Americans by disease-bearing thieves and slave-drivers; while the folly of his accomplices visited upon his homeland the horrors of syphilis and the cancer of tobacco-smoking. In keeping with the insidious migrant habit, he seems to have littered the land he invaded with his own genetic material, even going so far as to demand that some corner of a Hispaniolan field should be forever foreign; and like many others who arrive in small boats to subvert and destroy the indigenous civilisation, his origins were as dubious as his ignorance was profound. Thus his legacy is, even to this day, regarded as something worth celebrating.

Wind Power

There was a time when the visitations of Hurricanes Milton and Helene upon the Christian state of Florida would have been considered symptoms of divine judgement: a reminder that the abortion laws are still too liberal, or that too many precautions are being taken against the Heathen Chinee hoax of climate change. Such days of moderation appear to be drawing to a close with the Trumpster campaign's appropriation and turbo-charging of British expert fatigue. As famously pointed out by the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, Britain's ruling class is fed up with economists who whine that cutting the country loose from its biggest trading partner might adversely affect trade, and with biologists who preach that gender may not be quite so binary as Genesis makes it look, and with civil servants who claim that spending less money on something and sacking all the people who provide it may occasionally be followed by a purely coincidental lack of that very same something. The acolytes of the head-tribble and its tangerine dangler have taken this dynamic intellectual trend to its logical next level by blaming the weather on meteorologists. Allegations range from the kind that would likely be palatable to the sensible moderates of Team Starmer (resources meant for the deserving folks diverted to beastly immigrants) to those with a distinctly Murcan spin (Big Guvmint controls the weather, so let's lynch us an emergency worker). Doubtless the greatest country in the world will soon once again be taking pride in having restrained the well-meaning excesses of its favourite ally.

Unparalleled Depravity

Theatre-goers in Stuttgart have been gagging for medical attention after witnessing a gory mutilation of a 1921 Hindemith opera. Despite warnings of content including sexual violence and loud noises, a number of patrons became unwell when the performance turned out to contain exactly those; although it remains as yet unclear how far the malady was merely corporeal. The creator of the piece has suggested that her intention is to explore parallels between the Catholic church and kink/BDSM subcultures; nevertheless, Austrian bishops have already criticised it as a disrespectful caricature of a cannibalistic ritual which is performed in fancy dress and fetishises the bodily piercing of a man reportedly conceived via non-consensual ghost sex.

All the Profits of Arabia

In keeping with the current status of British public office as a networking opportunity, a former Minister for Wog-Bombing has availed himself of the chance to invest in the neglected aspects of his life by filling his boots courtesy of Westminster's favourite Islamic fundamentalist head-choppers. The eminently forgettable Sir Ben Wallace, who prudently jumped the sinking ship of government last year, is now employed by the House of Saud, which will doubtless benefit from his expertise when further flattening Yemen or taking its customary no-nonsense attitude to womanly wokeness. Just in case he gets his enemies of human rights mixed up, Wallace is forbidden to lobby the British government or give advice on British miltary prowess for slightly longer than Fishy Rishi clung to office, on pain of receiving some very stern looks from the advisory committee on snout and trotter placement in post-political troughs.

Available Now

Visitations of the Muse are strange and unpredictable events; Stephen King, with characteristic delicacy, once compared the process to a gremlin evacuating its bowels on his head. I am usually able to complete at least one new book each year; but last year's belated release, for all its moral and philosophical bite, was a recycling of already-published material. This March I started something new, without the encumbrance of a plan; by the end of June I had about twenty thousand words, but was stuck as to what happened next.

Then I saw this on Twitter (X be xxxxed):

It's an extract from a book on William Blake, who either saw visions or had hallucinations, depending on whom you believe; and my personal gremlin went YEEEEE-HAH! and, to put it mildly, unloaded. Between 30 June and 16 August I wrote 27,696 words of first draft about a philosophy professor who sees crabs; and in keeping with the absurdity of the enterprise, on the morning when my print copy of the final version arrived a complete stranger sat near me on the tube and opened a copy of Adam Nicolson's Life Between the Tides to the beginning of the fourth chapter, which is titled Crabs. I haven't read Sartre except for his play The Flies, which I liked; but the coincidence would have appealed to Arthur Koestler, of whom I have read quite a bit and who didn't much like Sartre.

Anyway, not to clatter chitinously on, Seeing Crabs is now available in paperback and PDF ebook, and would make an ideal gift for that special crustacean-oriented someone in your life; and unlike Amazon I pay my taxes.

Captured and Stalled

Although Labour may have abandoned the twenty-nine-billion climate pledge on the grounds that it was a pledge, that doesn't mean there is no more money; oh dear me no. In the accustomed Team Starmer spirit of change, the Government will be spending more than three-quarters of that amount on a BP-approved continuation of Conservative energy policy. Encouragingly, the major fossil fuels profiteers have all increased their construcive input over the past year or two, while tree-huggers, scientists and other antisemitic influences have been largely marginalised. Last month a few such pariahs warned that the policy would allow corporations to continue destroying the climate in the name of an unproved technology; although to their credit they were impartial enough to point out the overriding advantage that the taxpayer would be covering the cost.

Sustainably Social, Profitably Pragmatic

Astoundingly enough considering the pure and pristine conduct of the profteering sector in every other enterprise from moisture provision through infantine shelf-stacker training to the fair and above-board purchase of Government ministers, it seems that entrepreneurial involvement in social care has been carried out in accordance with priorities somewhat other than the dignity and welfare of social expendables. In the past dozen years, ninety-eight per cent of adult warehouses and ninety per cent of children's warehouses which have been closed for endangering their inmates were run by private companies. What can be the explanation? On the bright side, market forces have also ensured that homes for the elderly are concentrated where firms can exploit wealthy residents, while homes for children are concentrated where firms can exploit low property prices, leading to ever more incentives for vulnerable children and non-wealthy wrinklies to work hard and play by the rules.

Harsh Lessons

Team Starmer's plans to impose VAT on education profiteering are ghastly and awful and horrid and have caused a fall in registration numbers even before being definitively watered down. Team Starmer has even threatened to channel the money stolen from profit-making infantine development enterprises into, of all things, teachers in state schools. Have the pleblings no mobile phones? Is there no internet? Thinking of the children, or anyway the sustainable ones, the Independent Schools Council has issued a pre-emptive squeal about the paltry merchandise being directed to its members' classrooms, which could have apocalyptic consequences should the iceberg knock on across the entire sustainable juvenile training industry. Naturally, the ISC did not deign to notice that registrations in the state sector are also falling, thanks in large part to the decline in British breeding stock; although its chief executive did note tactfully that there were lots of young people with special educational needs and disabilities, and that it would be a shame if anything were to, like, happen to them.

Hoo Ha

For patriotic Britons who don't know what it's like to live in a society of masters and servants whose rulers would rather bury their wealth than distribute it, the project must be about the most rah-rah that can be imagined: to manufacture an exact replica of the Sutton Hoo ship and set it afloat. Obviously, so little of significance has changed since the Anglo-Saxon era that simply oodles will be discovered about what life was like, besides all the useful information to be gathered about the capacity of mediaeval vessels to sail through industrial sewage. By the same brilliant logic, a rich idiot who recreates Buckingham Palace on his Texas ranch will thereby absorb the Almanach de Gotha. As one would expect of a British project, it has naturally taken six years to notice that English oak is not quite so prevalant as it once was, and there doesn't seem to be the budget for buying in wood of the requisite stoutness, hardihood and entrepreneurial gumption. In theory it could be mined from the heads of those who think historical research means building fancy toys; but in practice, alas, there would be insufficient length and too many knots. The nearest remaining European oak forests are in France and Denmark, neither of which had anything remotely to do with Anglo-Saxon England.

Change from Chickenfeed

Faith in British politics looks set to be sensibly, moderately and forensically restored with the CEO of Team Starmer condescending to repay a full six per cent of the value of all the bungs he's received over the past five years. Having accepted more than a hundred thousand in advance payments for his services since pledging his way into the leadership in 2019, the Prime Minister has now refunded the value of the six thousand sterling reminders of who his paymasters are which have dropped through the letterbox since the beginning of July. Team Starmer extruded a flunkette from the industry ministry to reassure the Government's employers that ministers are still a good commercial proposition, even though the transition from opposition to government may mean a change from payment in advance to cash on delivery. What percentage of Labour policies will henceforth serve interests other than the corporate remains as yet unclear.

Sacred Bonds

Marriage in the eyes of the Vatican is of course a holy institution, provided that it takes place exclusively between pairs of heterosexuals to the accompaniment of the correct magic words. Even so, there are contexts in which love and sanctity must yield to higher powers, and since it's the Vatican mammon is naturally an overriding concern. Staff in Vatican institutions cannot marry one another and keep their jobs; both halves of one couple declined to resign on each other's behalf, so both have been Solomonically fired. Despite objections from employees, the rule is being strictly enforced because the Church, whose doctrines preach salvation at the hands of a Father through the intercession of His one-night stand and her Son, is morally concerned about the risk of nepotism.

Ovine Intervention

A district court judge in the USA has confessed himself in some doubt as to what sentence should be imposed upon an octogenarian rancher for the crime of creating unauthorised hunting sheep. The condemned pleaded guilty to having used tissue and testicles from a Pamir argali ram to cross-breed with a ewe and create a hybrid hitherto unknown upon Earth. Native to central Asia and first described to Europeans by Marco Polo, the Pamir argali is the biggest extant wild sheep species, and the miscreant's plan was to breed the hybrid for hunting in Minnesota and (where else?) Texas. In the end the judge overcame his discombobulation sufficiently to impose a sentence of six months in prison plus $24,000 in fines and payments, presumably on the grounds that there are more than enough oversized sheep in American blood-sports already.