Fiscally Emotive

Unsuccessful gamblers employ all sorts of strategems to gain more funding for their habit, from abject begging through pie-in-the-sky promises to threats, outright robbery and occasional violence. Some corporate gamblers, whose ability to mend roofs while the sun shines seems about equal to the current national average, have hit upon a new way of plumping up the stake: the owners of the Morrisons supermarket chain have "requested" their own workers to invest in the company. The blame, as usual, rests with "developments in the geopolitical environment" and "customer sentiment," neither of which any self-respecting entrepreneur would dream of guarding against. Nevertheless, such is the ingratitude of the wage-serf class that certain pluckless and pessimistic elements are unable to see the charm in gambling their increasingly shrivelled wherewithal on the assurance of people so competent that they can't persuade real investors to oblige.

Vessels of Mystery

The Christian state of Alabama has been forced to abort another execution after the justice dispensation team failed to find a vein in time. This is the second time in three months that the state's pious pastime has suffered an unfortunate hitch: in July, the Christian state of Alabama took three presumably improving hours to complete a lethal injection. The latest beneficiary claimed he had requested execution by gas, on the grounds of a phobia of needles and in accordance with his legal rights; but the Christian state of Alabama was in too much of a hurry to cater to his whims. A judge found it likely that the request had been duly made and issued a delaying order, which was overruled by the nation's Christian supreme court. Given the obvious trend of the Divine Will on the matter, the reason why no viable pathway to the prisoner's veins was clearly marked out by the holy light of righteousness remains as yet unclear.

A Slightly Smaller Send-off

Love is patient, love is kind; love is not puffed up, and if love happens to be gay it ought to rejoice in knowing its place. In accordance with the conclusion of the Lambeth blah-blah a few weeks ago, the Church of England has forbidden a married gay priest to officiate at her godfather's funeral. The godfather was an old friend of the late Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu, and had recently demonstrated his own moral worth by not knowing who Piers Morgan was on live television. His wife accused the Church of homophobia: an obvious injustice to an institution which has strained so long and hard to face both ways at once; while the fact that his god-daughter happens to be Tutu's own daughter gives the Church's ruling an added zest which will doubtless prove pleasing to the nose of the Almighty.

Out of the Woods

Fulfillment of the National Johnson's echo of the Trumpster's long-ago pledge to plant seventeen trillion trees, or whatever, has been somewhat imperilled by the recent drought. The Johnson régime burbled about planting seven thousand hectares of woodland a year by May 2024, which presumably would have been scaled down to something more realistic, such as a bit of prime-ministerial posturing beside an embarrassed sapling in April. According to a journalist's scan of Wikipedia, British trees are prey to a number of hazards, including the stirringly-named oak processionary moth; and gardeners are using more Mediterranean plants which may soon invigorate the national landscape with the unfussy bacterium Xylella fastidiosa. Fortunately, with the ligneous Liz Truss and her cabinet of woodentops in charge, the Government is unlikely to see any immediate need for more trees.

Self-Bleaching Whitewash

Returning briefly to the minor matter of those hundred and seventy thousand excess deaths among the non-royal classes, the independent inquiry into the public's experience will naturally be carried out by a private company nominated by the government whose conduct is under investigation. The company which eventually runs the inquiry will be selected from a list of twelve bidders whose bids have been invited by the Government, since the companies have in many cases demonstrated their competence by being paid by the government whose conduct is under investigation, during the period under investigation. Although this procedure has been denounced as an instance of those in power marking their own homework, the independence of the inquiry will in fact be rigorously safeguarded, as the government under investigation will urge its potential investigators to declare any conflict of interest; so the homework will actually have been marked, with all the efficiency and honesty we have come to associate with private corporations, before anyone in power even sees it.

Death, Where is thy Sting?

Amid a black and crawling mess
Of headlines in the mourning Press,
Our grief by Church and State endorsed
And by the truncheon well enforced,
Ten days we mourned that constancy
Which, by not dying, made us free.

Our duty done, with hush profound,
The leftovers plonked in the ground,
Look forward now to day more fair
With jewelled hat plonked on the heir,
Amid a crawling, crowing mess
Of headlines in rejoicing Press.

Fern Irreal

Inching Towards Liberty

Patriotic Britons who imagined that a Brexit benefit had finally been found in the return of the Imperial measurement system may be in for yet further disappointment, as a survey on the subject by the Department for Profiteering, Pollution and Panic has been denounced for, of all things, bias. Mensuration consumers were asked to state their preference between Imperial measurements only or a combination of Imperial measurements and the system invented by bloodthirsty Euro-wog anti-monarchists and subsequently forced upon plucky little Britain by the Strasbrussels dictatorship with the collaboration of the socialist Edward Heath. No option was given for sticking to metric units alone, and those traitors and backsliders who would have chosen it are advised to write to the Government so that their names and addresses can be noted.

Historical Straitjacket

Meanwhile, at the dark and devious heart of the vile Strasbrussels dictatorship, yet further mischief is brewing. Psychiatrists, those epitomes of élite metropolitan social-working wokeness, have decreed that Belgium has an actual history and, worse yet, that people might do themselves good by finding out about it. As might be expected, this process consists of economy-sabotaging free visits to cultural institutions, among which the only faint whiff of Britishness appears to be a sewer museum. There is no sign whatever that the beastly foreign opiates will include anything so healthy as the traditional British prescription for tincture of rah-rah and Churchill suppository.

Owning Glendower

The British Empire's oldest possession, whose status as a constituent country was so genocidally come by that it doesn't even have a symbol on the national flag, has reacted more or less grumpily to the investiture of its new national royal. The title Prince of Wales was first conferred by Edward I upon his son, the soon-to-be-disastrous Edward II, after a typically Christian colonial war featuring incendiary restructuring of peasant holiday homes and subsequent ethnic cleansing of Welsh tenants to make way for worthier ones. Now that the latest placeholder has formally undergone his Ruritanian transmogrification, certain mischievous elements are agitating for him to learn the Welsh language: a move with all the surreal Britishness of some woke National Johnson quoting Kipling in Hindustani.

Radical Measures

There still seems no end in sight for the discharge of fragrant revelations concerning denizens of the Trumpster swamp. John Kelly, a retired general who was promoted to chief of the White House staff after the Trumpster tweet-sacked his predecessor, apparently had such confidence in his employer that he sneaked out and bought a copy of a 2017 bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Besides being flawed by the lack of personal contact between the experts and their analysand, the book seemingly pays little or no attention to the role of the Trumpster's hydrophobic head-tribble, whose radioactive defecations exert such a salutary effect upon what pass for mental processes in the Tangerine Cranium. Nevertheless, Kelly managed to equip himself with concepts such as "inflated ego" and "pathological liar," which provided a useful guide to the head-tribble's more whimsical spurts and splatters. Given those levels of intellectual achievement for which his administration is justly revered, one of the more astounding allegations to emerge about the White House under the Trumpster régime must surely be the claim that at least one of the senior staff was capable of reading a book.