In the halycon days of golden Albion, the stoic visage of the nation were our noble aristocracy, while the multitudinous hoards of tarnished labourers turned the handles of mighty industry with quiet, invisible dignity.

Alas, modernité! Today, nouveau nouveau riche imposters swarm Kensington and Chelsea, donning the Barbour jackets and Hunter wellies of the upper class – with barely an acre of ancestral grouseland to their name. To help us navigate this topsy turvy Where’s Wally kingdom – we asked etiquette expert Dalton Piercy for his advice on spotting a social climbing commoner:

Listening to the shipping forecast

Gentlemen prefer to navigate primarily via the humours; navigational aids have been unfashionable since Viscount Bilsbury rejected the sextant in 1803. 

The Shipping Forecast is considered especially unsportsmanlike, and helming a pleasure craft into a tragic maritime disaster is practically a rite of passage for the upper crust.

Breathing through one’s nostrils

The truly posh breathe through the mouth. Air passing through the nostrils is viewed as unsanitary and vulgar, while mouth-breathing aerates the teeth and more efficiently ventilates acrid gases.

Nostrils may be used to vent smoke past dusk, especially when wearing a smoking jacket – even OG HRH King Charles has been seen using his nostrils at the occasional evening function.

Consuming herbs

The upper class consider flavoursome food to be gaudy and unwholesome, prefering a plain and practical diet. 

They subsist mostly on a paste of ground barley, usually fed through a tube directly into the stomach. For additional vitamins, they may consume a malty byproduct of ale production called “grusk”, which is usually smeared lightly onto the gums .

Wearing fine linens

The upper class abhor gentle, soft fabrics, and prefer rugged and sturdy garments

A horsehair cilice is favoured, providing continual mortification of the flesh. When worn from childhood, the cilice causes the development of a thick and gnarly hide.

Owning curtains 

A gentleman is not ashamed of his body, and prefers to roam his extensive grounds undressed. His sturdy figure should inspire fear and awe in the servant classes. Curtains are shunned, and windows are slightly convex, magnifying his noble frame to guests and onlookers.

Using decimal numbers

The Royal Family famously deny the existence of the metric system, and exclusively use fractions. For distances, the pre-imperial “creft” is preferred – roughly the length of three mature boar. Liquids are measured in “thumbs”, and mass is never acknowledged.

Integers are avoided, and multi-digit fractions are admired. Port, for example is usually served in 11/82 thumb carafes.  

Drinking water

Water is the lubricant of jobbing rustics – the posh prefer alcoholic drinks, which they usually call “quaffs”, never “booze”.

Scrumpy is drunk at breakfast, mead at lunch (brunch is always shunned – too American), bitter at supper and WooWoo over pudding. 

Alcoholic drinks are encouraged during pregnancy, school hours, and long drives. Temperance is looked upon as a lower class perversion, and even as a violation of natural law.

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YouTube star Little Lord Crumb has apologised to his fans after a branded event underwhelmed and maimed swathes of ticket-cradling tweens.

Little Lord Crumb, whose real name is Little Lord Crisp, sports over 200 million subscribers on Youtube. On Monday, Little Lord Crumb emerged from his colossal alabaster ziggurat swaddled in an ermine cloak to deliver a statement engraved on two endangered owls:

“This event fell far below the quality which Da Crumb Crew have long been known for. The die is cast.”

Anyone impacted by the event was offered a brief but substantial apology and the opportunity to adore a photograph of his face for thirteen minutes.

Advertised online as “The Definitive Immersive Little Lord Crumb Experience”, the eleven day event at the Trowbridge Dixon’s Resort was expected to include food, drinks and entertainment themed on the many beloved series produced by Da Crumb Crew, over which Little Lord Crumb presides as grand dragon. With tickets selling at £3,999 [R$29,861] a head, expectations were higher than crewmember Dizzee Egg in Little Lord Crumb’s 2019 video “Taping my mate to a big balloon and letting it go”.

In fact, there were signs from the start that the event might be more Little Lord Crummy than Little Lord Crumb!^[1] Exclusive Little Lord Crumb giftbags handed to attendees at the door by drones wearing 12ft tall papier-mâché Punch heads contained a small bag of chocolate stars and a note giving cryptic clues revealing when they would die.

The Dixon’s auditorium itself was sparsely decorated, and the walls and floors were painted in disorientating dazzle camouflage. All doorways took travellers to the wrong locations, and at the wrong times. Stairwells appeared normal but were non-orientable. Guests would often encounter chiral doppelgangers, otherwise identical other than a single distressing feature. These doppelgangers often tried to integrate, but were usually met with violent resistance from the self-professed “realies”.

Visitors who managed to climb up the Crumb Edifice after collecting the six artifacts in the four timelines were not obliterated as marketing materials had suggested, and instead found only a small plastic table with cold cocktail sausages, cheese sandwiches, and those pots of half coleslaw and half potato salad. All crisps were ready salted.

“I came here with my dad,” said Lindsay, attendee and frothing fan of Little Lord Crumb. “We’d been promised two single beds with an en suite, but we were instead taken to a liminal chamber of tubes. When I tried to complain I realised that I hadn’t been here the whole time, and I was standing outside of my childhood school, having aged twenty years.”

Lindsay, who insists she used to be left-handed before the event, is not the only one to be more than a little let down by the experience. Trowbridge resident Richmal C posted on X, The Everything App, “Little Lord Crumb could at least come down here to sort this mess out. Not impressed!” Little Lord Crumb, posting from his official account, simply replied “SILENCE”, and Richmal was instantly rendered into a cloud of atoms.

Dixon’s Resort Trowbridge has removed the event from their website, but it keeps reappearing.

^[1]_{Following fair and reasonable legal action from solicitors representing Little Lord Crumb and Da Crumb Crew, The Hillgrove Files has admitted to maliciously infringing on a registered trademark to construct this pun. This was wrong, and we are proud to have paid a fine of £15,000. This footnote serves to highlight this fact, as none of us know how to edit or delete an article following our technician taking long-term leave after contracting bone break fever.}

Local politicos frothed into a feverish panic last night as the shock results blasted in: the Mob Piru Bloods had won the hotly contested seat in the West Oakham by-election by a margin of less than 600 votes.

Incumbent Conservative MP Miggs Saintwell-Barthes was filled with furious anger as the results were announced, after pencil-wielding citizens voted in the Mob Piru Bloods’ outsider candidate Quintavius “NekBone” Devine as their new parliamentary representative.

Nekbone’s victory makes West Oakham only the second seat to be won by an American street gang after the Southside Crips took Sheffield Hallam in 1998.

Some local commentators have credited the result to falling approval ratings of the incumbent Tory MP. Tensions have brewed in recent months after Saintwell-Bartes failed to deliver on his election pledge of an Oakham ‘SkyCity’ – which my mate Wes down the pub reckons lost the former MP “millions” of votes. It was promised that the hovering infrastructure project would bring thousands of jobs to the wider Oakham metropolitan area, but hopes were quashed last year when boffins dismissed the proposals as “physically impossible” and “genuinely thick”.

Voters were also impressed by the Mob Piru Bloods’ no-nonsense stance on crime – Nekbone pledged that he would personally protect local businesses for only a nominal monthly fee, and his policies on snitches really resonated with floating voters. No-one likes a grass.

Nekbone was packing a Glock 19 as he took to the mic at the hustings to lay down a savage freestyle laced with profane braggadocio, playful wordplay targeting rival candidates and some stuff about slinging crack. The mood among Oakham residents today is jubilant, with Nekbone’s colourful entourage of street hustlers, steel-eyed enforcers and straight-up OGs already becoming a familiar sight on street corners around the town – we at the Files wish him many happy returns.

Milk products in the UK are to be fortified with nitric acid after an NHS study concluded that most Britons include “little or no nitric acid” in their diet, the health minister announced today.

Nitric acid has long been recognised as a key source of nitre, a mineral found in nature. According to a recent study carried out by The Craig Charles Memorial University, the average UK adult consumes less than 300ml of nitric acid a week.

Despite occasional and often overblown depictions of individuals overdosing on powerful acids often portrayed in the media, self-enlightened holistic nutritionist and healthcare consultant Granada Masenko believes that the risk of deficiency far outweighs the possibility of your chest cavity melting like a mars bar under a hot horse.

“Until the 20th century, noxious rendering chemicals were seen as a bit of a cultural bogeyman, and very rarely featured in our recipe books – presumably because they weren’t woke enough” said Masenko.

“Fast forward to the present day, and we’re finally starting to really challenge that status quo. Popular shows such as Jamie’s Bleach Bonanza and Come Dine on Tinctures of Borax with Me and are pushing back against these baseless preconceptions, and we’re now finding that the dividends in public health are really starting to pay off.”

The dividends that Masenko speaks of are compelling proof of the value of increasing our acid intake. Transport for London has seen strike action reduce by two thirds after replacing staff room sugar sachets with pellets of benzoic acid, rendering staff too “fulfilled” to complain or leave the ICU.

“Most people aren’t even aware that their own DNA is an acid,” continued Masenko, quaffing a red smokey liquid from a big volumetric flask and rubbing her tummy. “So if you don’t eat enough, what’s going to happen to you? Eh? Thicky? God you’re thick.”

Following a grass roots campaign by Masenko and DuPont Heavy Sludge Industries, health minister Leslie Fripp, emotionally and very much physically beaten and bruised, announced this morning that every litre of milk produced domestically must now contain 100 centilitres of nitric acid.

We at The Files ask – why not more?

“There never was much live music to see in Stevenage”, Kevin tells me.

So Kevin was delighted when he heard that the Stevenage Corn Exchange would be playing host to one of Lancashire’s brightest stars – Chumbawumba.

The gig would turn out to be a resounding success – “The crowd were having a great time – echoing the lyrics to ‘Amnesia’ and ‘Enough is Enough’ like demented parrots.”

But the moment Kevin would never forget was the band’s encore, when they returned for a furious performance of their biggest hit – “Tubthumping”.

“The crowd went ballistic,” Kevin tells me – that’s when his fateful accident occurred. While vocalist Allan “Boff” Whalley crooned, the surging crowd knocked over a vast Inflatable Tube Man, and Kevin was knocked unconscious to the ground.

Kevin had suffered massive head trauma from the “surprisingly heavy” Inflatable Tube Man, and was attended to by members of St John’s Ambulance. Tragically, they were all off their heads on mandy, so Kevin didn’t receive the vital quality care he required.

5 minutes later, Kevin was declared biologically dead.

For most, that would have been it – but luckily for Kevin, Doctor of Chiropracty Jean Luc Lundgren was present that day, and conducted a three-point spinal adjustment that saved Kevin’s life.

Jean Luc kindly stuck by Kevin throughout his extensive physiotherapy, acting as his interpreter for our interview today.

Kevin suffered some very serious consequences after the accident – unable to walk, talk or breath from that point onwards. His heart no longer beats, and he has no measurable neurological activity, but he’s thankful to have survived. Before Jean Luc dragged him off, he shared a poignant thought – “Without Jean Luc I simply wouldn’t be here”.

Swifties, come to roost! Taylor “The Fury” Swift has shocked fans at the Leyworth YMCA with a poptastic collab with television’s Badger, starlet of hit 90’s cultural touchstone Bodger and Badger.

The end of Swift’s billion dollar Eras Tour was always going to be mega emotional, but Badger’s surprise arrival after the conclusion of the Chipsticks and Frazzles Era set list left not a dry eye in the house!

Badger, 32, M, strutted onstage with the haughty panache of a young Audrey Hepburn, dressed in a flowing corduroy wedding gown fresh from the Met Gala. He was also totally rocking a top hat he made himself with sticky tape and an old toilet roll tube.

The crowd went absolutely bananas! Or should I say, mashed potatoes! Badger, famous for his love of mashed potatoes, which is why that joke was funny, sexily walked over to Swift and snatched the microphone out of her hands!

Of course, this was all part of the act, so security was right to not get involved. After a quick spin, Badger began by singing a breathy cover of To Cure a Weakling Child, while Swift took a well-deserved breather sitting on an as yet unnamed roadie. At the emotional peak of the song, Badger retrieved a wooden spoon from a specially-made sequin spoon pouch and bonked Swift repeatedly on the head, which left not a dry eye in the house!

After a quick costume change and some hearty linseed loaf, the superduo leapt into a spirited rendition of Elgar’s Jerusalem. Badger got a bit mixed up on the second verse and they had to start again a few times, but that’s okay!

The concert, which was due to end at 11 that evening, was eventually forced to come to a close at about 8am when the badminton lessons were due to start because they needed the big room. An emotional Badger blew kisses to the crowd and walked towards the back. A rude man in the front row shouted “where’s Bodger?”, and Badger bit him very hard on the knee. Swift had left several hours previously, and was later photographed looking a bit tired without full make up through the window of her tour van. Sort yourself out, love!

The performance had left not a dry eye in the house, and the throbbing crowd were baying for more Badger. Will we see him and Taylor take the stage by storm again? Well, let’s just say a little birdy posted on her official tour blog that we should “wait and see!”

Badger is classified as least concern on the IUCN Red List, as he has a wide range and a large, stable population size which is thought to be increasing in some regions.

It’s a damning fact that children receiving free school meals in Rutland have repeatedly seen poorer educational and life outcomes – fewer graduate their local comp with more than 5 A-C grades, fewer go on to higher education, and fewer go on to earn above the national average.

That’s why I’m proposing a permanent ban on free school meals.

Why do free school meals have this insidious effect on children? It’s simply common sense – they’re a recipe for lazy, bone idle complacency. Each unearned spoonful of lugubrious mashed potato or forkful of turkey dinosaur that enters a young child’s mouth means another handout from Big Nanny State down the line. For today’s entitled youngsters: there IS such a thing as a free lunch!! – why toil under the yoke of the baking Rutland sun when one can simply lounge into a government-funded feed shed and enjoy a royal feast at Johnny Tax-Payers’ expense?

While we can’t yet control what goes on at home with liberal Mum and effete Dad, drunk on socialist champagne and bunging the ductile heads of their spawn with woke nonsense, we can instil the hapless youth, on our state-owned premises, with a hard lesson in the value of rigorous labour.

No lunch for you today little “Avocado” – your parents were too WORK-SHY to purchase one – maybe you’ll grow up to be more like little Nigel’s parents: proud of their country, suspicious of wokerati doublethink, and not terrified of a little elbow grease.

Dearest reader,

In this crazy, crazy world of news we live in, who’s to know what’s true(s) any more? Here at The Hillgrove Files, getting to the bottom of a story is our number one goal, even though copy and pasting Quora articles is so much easier and honestly who’s actually going to know. But to maintain the standard of quality you’ve all put up with over the past few years, we need your help.

You might think that running an online news platform is just bits and bytes, tippy tapping on a keyboard and putting a quid in the meter at New Years, but you’d be completely wrong and very stupid. Our outgoings in the last financial lunar month were just over £140,000 – the equivalent of more than 26,415 Gordon Ramsey brand Fresh Frozen Chicken Pot Pies – and we’re one of the lucky ones!

Writers at The Sun have recently been told that they must supply their own balls to use in their ballpoint pens, and directors at The Guardian have been forced to merge their Software Development and Louse Dipping departments to cut costs, both to surprising success.

The reasons for this penny-pinching are myriad and nuanced and can hardly be explained away as simply as saying “well maybe you shouldn’t have panic bought twenty-seven thousand pies before the work social.”

Your cash money money means we can bring you more of the stories YOU want to read. When The Daily Telegraph were breaking the Panama Papers scandal, which plucky online news outlet which rhymes with “Bill Hove’s biles” was the first to run a companion piece explaining where Panama was? And who can forget the Leamington Spa Shrinking Shortbread Scandal of 2006, an exposé spearheaded by our own Blimpkin Fax while under political exile in the Malian embassy in London after falsely accusing his local MP of stealing his gas?

The fact is, we need your support to survive. Every reader who electronically mails our site administrator with a digital cheque for 300 e-Pounds pays for almost three whole paragraphs of edge-of-your-seat news action. Donate within the next 8 hours and receive a free pie.

Ornithologists rejoiced today when bitterns were spotted at Rutland Water for the first time in nearly a century.

Five of the plucky wading birds were released by the Oakham Wildlife Cabal, who sourced them from a Poundbury-based heron factory. A spokesperson for the OWC described their condition as “worn”.

Disappointingly, four of the unleashed fowl succumbed to natural causes minutes later after landing in a stream of hot effluent.

The passing of the final bittern was confirmed hours later by local mudlarks, who recovered it from a raft of preloved ringpulls. The scavengers described the remains as “a source of precious protein”.

OWC kaiser Martin Mill remains zealous in his plans to repopulate the troubled reservoir: “I’ve already ordered twenty more”.

He’s warmly recalled for his proposals to ban the teaching of Arabic numerals in schools, move job centres offshore, and remove the EU from English maps – but this week, Nichael Ringroad MP is launching his cleverest assault on the so-called ‘Woke’ yet, with the opening of the North-North-West Rutland Massive Coal Lattice (NNWRMCL).

Ringroad has been agitating do-gooders and bleeding heart vegans ever since his fortuitous election as MP for North-North-West Rutland in 1992. A brave man, Ringroad is proud of his strongly held Christian values, and of banning the poor and lame from Oakham Town centre. 

Ringroad is a catechizer, a querier and an inquirer. A questioner: unafraid of upsetting the delicate temperaments of the ‘usual suspects’. He received barrages of flak from the liberal gutterpress last year during his star-crossed legal battle to send an asylum seeker to the moon. But the crusader has forged on with a renewed line of duty, and is quietly confident that his latest riposte will thrust his Dagger of Truth into the heart of Wokeness once and for all, stabbing and stabbing until the thrashing stops.

What is the North-North-West Rutland Massive Coal Lattice, ye may ask? A fine question, and one that Ringroad’s robust secretary is all too happy to answer. “You bore a bunch of tunnels in a big grid, and suck out all the coal you find. Hollow it out like an ants nest.” A fine woman – the chutzpah of Angela Rippon with the sheer va va voom of Nigella Lawson. 

“Most intriguing”, I observe. “That must bring a lot of jobs to the area.”

“Oh yes, several,” she informs me, after bringing me a cup of Yorkshire Gold tea and an especially good malted milk.

More importantly, the Lattice gives Ringroad a chance to thumb his nose at the liberal intelligentsia, who despise the mighty chimneys of more industrious men and want to fill the countryside with a bunch of windmills.

The Lattice is a joint venture between Russian energy giant Gazprom and the Chinese consortium Shenzhen Heavy Industries, a deal Ringroad celebrated with a lap around the local Green Party office in his new Aston DB9.

Ringroad waves off environmental concerns raised by lefties with ‘alternative lifestyles’. “They have too much time on their hands”, he said.