what a week

what a week hey? gosh, indeed, i mean savile, what happened there? i cant even remember when that story started. i cant remember being surprised – it all rather crept up on you, didn't it? a bit like savile himself! but certainly i was dumbfounded and horrified. i mean, what the hell? bbc! where are you! as Norwich city fan delia smith once said. meanwhile, George osborne doesn't pay for his ticket on the train only to dig into his pockets and pay the £170 or whatever it was or else be thrown in with the animals in the standard seating area. ah but that was a long time ago, an age in the life of the newsreel. but that boy, that George, he's a cheeky one. one day he's skipping the train, the next he's parking a turd square on the head of a pensioner. i also took a train. i took one from crewkerne to home. a girl was crying on the platform and i offered her some chocolate. she said 'oh, go on then' and snapped a bit off. to be honest, she snapped off a bit more than i hoped she had. but i couldn't very well ask her to give some back, with the tears down her face and everything. the train was held up somewhere in Dorset. i had no idea where, it was late and i dont have GPS on my phone. it wasn't a station that's for sure. that's for sure! it was pitch black i tell you. we were all told to get off, they had run out of coal, or whatever it is that makes trains run, and we had to walk to the sea and get a boat the rest of the way. get back and wham, hurricane city! Sandy's on her way. it's like the motion picture Grease, with john travolta and olivia newton john, and just as badass. one of those BBC reporters, john sopel i think, he just loves it, kept saying the sea is swelling like a cauldron. presenters were lining up to get their storm report in, just hoping, hoping, hoping that they will be on TV when a building falls down or a person gets swept away. day after tomorrow, that's what it was, the soundtrack was virtually playing over the montage of waves and satellite images. does new york know when it ends and when its representation begins, i wonder.

The milk

That night I drank milk. I drank it and kept drinking it. I drank all I had and then some. I went out to get more. I cleaned out the local shop's whole supply. I drank full fat semi skimmed and skimmed. I drank it straight from the bottle the carton and the vat and the truck. I had a hose. I had a funnel. I drank until the cows came home. 

I drank it non-stop until the gulps hurt then I drank more. I drank until I couldn't breathe and then I kept drinking. I drank until the calcium in my teeth made them so strong that they bit through my tongue without me noticing. I drank until the milk eroded the back of my throat and mixed blood into the falling milky cocktail. 

I drank until my bones were so so strong they destroyed themselves. I drank until my eyes cried milk and drowned the pupils so they looked like pathetic tiny raisins, shriveled and lifeless, on the expanses of two identical moons. I drank until the quantities of calcium turned my brain into an udder, and made me see cows floating in the milk lake of my tears. I held onto them as they passed. They were indifferent to my using them as a raft. They didn't even say moo. We floated towards eternity. Towards the inevitable waterfall that no one is strong enough to paddle against with their pathetic puny human limbs. I drank as we fell as we tumbled through the sky as the milk painted my clothes and hair and got up my nose and charged into my lungs. I drank and I drank. I drank all the milk we were drowning in, to save us, and then cried it right back out again, so we started all over again, the flapping the gasping the screaming for someone to save us and the drinking the endless drinking of the milk

Exclusive: A Tough Diet for Tough Times.

Government cuts are causing people to eat their own walls, a new study had shown. The politically central think tank, the Institute for Political Structural Integrity (IPSI) has found that increasing numbers of lower to middle class families are finding food too expensive, as wages stop rising, and are using the walls in their homes for extra food. But the consequences can be dire. 

Says Anne Brickton, spokesperson at the IPSI, 'the problem gets worse the lower down the wage spectrum you go. Those on minimum wage, for example, are eating particularly malnutritious walls, and those living in flats built in the Thatcher era are eating downright poisonous ones.'

Another consequence which seems to be too oft ignored is the importance a wall has in keeping up a roof. Anne says 'many walls have a variety of purposes – partitioning rooms and keeping ceilings up. Exterior walls also keep in heat, meaning that with every extra wall eaten, the fuel bills rise, and many of these people are already in fuel poverty. Without walls many roofs will fall down, causing the whole structure to collapse.' Food has never been part of the intended purpose of walls, says wall expert Peter Clockers, and in fact cause more harm than good. Anne declined to comment in any detail on whether the walls of the rich keep up ceilings up. 'We would not want to speculate on that at the moment,' she said, 'as far as we know the rich have not taken to wall-eating so hopefully the problem will not arise.' 

The walls of the rich are especially thick and a diet of thick wall is certainly a risk. However, GP Mark Darkwood says it is possible that the genetic constitution of wealthier people allows them to digest such walls, but this is yet to be verified. 'At the moment we are treating less well-off people,' he says, 'who's walls are lacking in any nutritional value whatsoever.' 

It is unlikely that more affluent families will turn to wall-eating because of the preferential treatment given to the wealthier under the coalitions policies. 'The tax revenues from the wealthiest in our country is invaluable to the UK's income,' said David Cameron. 'These are the wealth generators of our country and we should be supporting them as they support us towards recovery. Damaging the foundational integrity of wealthy families' homes will simply drive them overseas.' Labour have yet to develop a serious policy that goes beyond criticism of the Government, who reply to Labour's accusations of incompetence by saying that for every eight walls currently eaten by the poor, it would be only be reduced to seven under Labour. The Government stand by their commitment to lower the deficit even of it means a few months or even years of wall-eating. Cameron says, 'it's tough for everyone now but with hard work and a stuff upper lip we will once again thrive as the prosperous, magnificent and imposing nation that we once were, and on that day the poor (at least, the one who have survived) can re-upgrade to the ready meals and canned goods that they so enjoy.' 

So, 'hang in there' is the message right now but for an increasing number of families around the country, it is fast becoming a question of all for one and one for wall.