also been revealed that chimpanzee meat is being sold in Britain to eat. Chimpanzees – could they get any more amazing? Are we to believe that they can add being delicious to their other qualities, like being funny and sexy? Before you ask, no, chimp meat doesn’t taste like chicken. It tastes like bananas and tea. I could see this catching on – imagine at Christmas. Instead of arguing over who gets a drumstick, there’ll be enough for everyone to have a finger.
Tesco plan to introduce the country’s first drive-through supermarket. Actually, that’s something Paul Gascoigne tried out when he lost control in the car park of Morrisons after knocking back a bargain bucket of Listerine.
Takeaways are to have their hygiene rating stuck on their doors in stars, from one to five. You put one star on a takeaway door – the rats will just think it’s their dressing room.
The boss of Burger King reckons British women are ugly. I’d like to disagree, but he is an expert on disappointing lifeless baps. How can he say that? The guy’s a clown. No, wait, that’s the other lot isn’t it? He also said the UK was terrible. Yes, some of it is. Burger King, for starters.
Last winter it got so cold that at one point a Geordie was spotted wearing a coat. It was later proven to be a hoax. It wasn’t a coat; it was simply a tattoo of a coat. The freakish snow conditions came as a total surprise to the authorities, for the third year in a row. Philip Hammond, the UK transport secretary, said that he had learned some valuable lessons. Next time he’ll just phone in and say he can’t get to work ’cause of the snow.
There was total travel misery, with thousands of train passengers attempting to reach Scotland and succeeding. Norfolk proved impossible to get to, bad news for anyone needing to bury a body. If you are supposed to be visiting relatives this Christmas make sure you check conditions of the relevant roads. If they’re clear you’ll have to make up another excuse for not going.
People waiting for the Eurostar had to queue for eight hours in the freezing cold, treated with no respect or consideration. Making their planned holiday at Disneyland Paris unnecessary. The queue for the Eurostar stretched for over a mile round St Pancras. Some passengers eventually abandoned plans to go to Paris and had to fuck their secretary on the pavement. The Eurostar was cancelled? Doesn’t it travel in a tunnel under the ground? Are the tunnels crowded with nomadic populations migrating from the new ice age?
Some people waiting for Eurostar became hysterical. How bad is the UK now when people cry because they can’t get to Belgium? Stop bloody moaning. What is more true to the original story of Christmas than taking a highly difficult journey, which puts your wife and child’s health at risk, and ends up with you having to sleep on a filthy floor because all the hotels are full?
Conditions at Heathrow were described as ‘Third World’. ‘Every day little Mr Alan Thomas has to walk 500 yards for water. Down to the gents past Tie Rack and Garfunkel’s.’ Can you imagine being one of those families stuck at Heathrow on Christmas Day? Waking up your 5-year-old to tell him that Santa has been, and he’s brought a ploughman’s sandwich and a pair of socks. Heathrow looked less like a Third World country and more like Heathrow airport exactly 12 months ago.
Apparently a flight to Newcastle was cancelled seven times – although that may’ve just been because the plane itself simply refused to go there. One passenger said it was ‘absolute mayhem’. Weird – my idea of ‘absolute mayhem’ isn’t a load of people sat around looking grumpy. It’s an astronaut indiscriminately firing a custard gun in Debenhams. I was upset that all those flights were cancelled. Anything that slows down the approaching death of the planet is a tragedy in my opinion. The snow caused quite a few injuries round my way. Apologies, but if you will keep saying ‘So much for global warming’, I’ve got no choice but to punch you.
My favourite Christmas game is hide and seek – last year I was undiscovered until New Year’s Eve. People worry about the elderly being lonely at Christmas, but the old woman next to me got loads of cards. They’re piling up on her doorstep since the letterbox got full. People were unable to buy presents due to online stores shutting down delivery. Mainly because people confused ‘some snow’ with a deadly stream of radioactive lava preventing them from walking further than their own door.
It’s definitely worth a deliveryman risking his life on treacherous roads so my missus can get Sex and the City 2 on DVD. Royal Mail postmen did their best to clear the parcel backlog – helping themselves to a couple of packages whenever they knocked off a shift.
Why does everyone always say there’s no grit? I saw loads of grit – granted, it was all in a van surrounded by bewildered council workers. They couldn’t find enough salt in Scotland? Surely they could have flushed the inhabitants of the motorway services onto the roads and opened a few arteries? I’m pleased they haven’t gritted the pavements; sliding into strangers is the only physical contact Glaswegians get.
A great-granddad nearly froze to death when passers-by ignored him after he slipped on ice and lay on a city street for nearly five hours. It’s hard to believe he lay there all that time and nobody stole his shoes. Happily, he got back home, where he’ll spend the next three months being ignored before freezing to death.
The head of British Gas said their profit margins are smaller than Marks & Spencer’s. I think the difference that he fails to recognise is that thousands of old people don’t die every year because they can’t afford to shop at M&S. Despite making £2.2 billion in profit this year, British Gas executives say they have been forced to pass on to customers some of the rising costs of heating their country mansions.
So, farewell then, News of the World. ‘Thank You & Goodbye’ was the final headline. Apparently, ‘You Can’t Sue, We No Longer Exist!’ wouldn’t quite fit onto the front page. If Rupert Murdoch had been allowed to take full control of Sky, it would’ve been great. You could’ve pressed the red button and it’d have given you 24-hour coverage of Gordon Brown’s bins. The whole Murdoch business reminds me of Grima Wormtongue from The Lord of the Rings. Formerly a tenacious-looking, sharp practitioner, whispering poison into the ear of power, suddenly this arch manipulator looks like a fucking Tequila worm.
The politicians, of course, are more like Denethor, whom Sauron drove to despair with images of his swelling armies. Looking deep into the palantír of the media, our leaders thought it showed them reality, when it actually only showed what Murdoch and his like directed their gaze towards.
I’m so disgusted with News International that I refuse to read anything they print. Including my own column in the Sun, which is why I write it with my eyes closed. I say ‘write’ – I mean, I let my cat run across the keyboard and then clean it up with the spell check. If it’s good enough for Dan Brown, it’s good enough for me. Just to be on the safe side, I’ve never given the Sun my mobile number. In fact, every week I dictate the column onto the voicemail of a random victim of crime. Of course, it’s easy to learn the precise details of people’s mobile-phone messages. There’s the high-tech procedure where you hack into their SIM account, and the lower-tech one where you somehow lure them into a giant imitation train carriage.
The hacking story took an explosive twist when it was alleged that the News of the World hacked into Milly Dowler’s phone. The police are investigating – which shouldn’t take too long. Officers, flick back your diaries to 2002 and see if any of the entries read ‘Helped News of the World hack Milly Dowler’s phone’. Some policemen were so sickened by the News of the World that they refuse to even line their budgie’s cage with it. Instead, they are using used bills with non-sequential
