I got up, made a pot of coffee and sat and read the paper. A churchgoing charity worker had stolen enough money from a 102-year-old woman to buy three properties in the UK and to consider buying a village in Spain. Nearly one in three court cases at magistrates’ courts fails to go ahead because the defendants can’t be arsed to turn up. The British are now so fat that endangered breeds of heavy horses such as the Suffolk Punch are being revived as personal transport. A computer screen aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth, our spanking new, state-of-the-art aircraft carrier, launched last week, was seen to be displaying the logo of Windows XP (copyright 1985–2001). An NHS contractor concealed 700,000 test results in a cupboard because it couldn’t be bothered processing them. A Nigerian-led gang has scammed the NHS of 12 million quid.
At this point, two or three hundred cigales commenced their wall-of-sound crepitations as if they were as disturbed by the news as I was.
Turning to world news, I read that George Soros has been accused of illegally trying to topple an African head of state. A lawyer called Eric Conn has successfully defrauded the US government of $600 million. A four-bedroom flat overlooking New York’s Central Park would now cost me as much as $50 million, if I can find a few 100-year-olds to rob, or invoice the NHS on homemade headed notepaper. A new Nigerian mafia has teamed up with the Sicilian mafia to control street prostitution in Palermo, while a North African mafia has had the breathtaking cheek to start operating in Naples. Turkey is re-allowing asylum seekers to move to Europe. The Great Barrier Reef, one of the wonders of the natural world, has been valued at
£33 billion.
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