Maybe it’s just a spell of dreadful results, but with just three more days to go before this blisteringly awful year ends, I am hyper-aware by now that the next 365 days will be even more ghastly, and it will be relentless 247.
We all know we will have no money, but it is far worse that we will also lose many chums, not in the Gone To Meet Their Maker sense. In the last three months, three good friends have almost completed their emigration plans to set up shop in downtown Bogota—or maybe it was Bologna—whatever. It certainly wasn’t Bournemouth. We won’t even be able to visit them because Air Passenger Duty, Fuel Duty, Zero-Carbon Duty and Feed the Poor- who-can-only-use-small-dinghies-to-travel-Duty, will be more expensive than the flight - even with bags!
Our lives will, by March or April, be controlled by complete lunatics, who ten years ago, you wouldn't have trusted to order food for themselves in a McDonald's without getting it wrong or forgetting where they parked the car.
They will be part of the Gauleiter Brigade being installed by Big Ange, The Red Marauder, under the Local Devolution of Authority to extraordinarily small-minded people with strange accents. This will be the beginning of the Stasi-Citizen system of local Government so that if your child is seen climbing a tree or your dog barks at a stranger whilst standing by your front door, you will have been committing a local infringement of personal community entitlements and will be subject to an on-the-spot £500 fine. There is no appeal system proposed. This will result in no one going out.
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