The traditional chant of the Oakham Pilferers, My Ol’ Da Kicked our Dog to Death, is to be banned from their home stadium, the club has confirmed today. Any fan found singing the song, humming it, or thinking about it within 100ft of either penalty box will be ejected, and repeat offenders will be forced to eat their season ticket in a big pie.

[Verse 1]

So my dad went round t’pub

And saw a horrid Irish

He tried to steal me da’s last bit o’coal

So the boys smashed his head in with iron rods

The only son of the wealthy Dowager Countess Coppice of Nipp, singer-songwriter Spotty Coppice IV released only one LP before dying of stairs in 1921, but it was the enduring success of My Ol’ Da Kicked our Dog to Death which led to its adoption by Oakham’s most devoted and frothing hooligans in the mid 1960s. But although the surface layer of the lyrics, and especially the rousing chorus, clearly express the values of the club – pride; strength; kicking things – Pilferers F.C. owner Ferris Chiffon believes there is a subtext that many of the drunk and clearly state-educated fans may have missed.

“It has been brought to our attention that this song can come across as, in some contexts, advocating for acts of random violence, and is not even tangentially related to football,” announced Chiffon at a press junket held in the carpark of the Toby Carvery.

“In the interests of inclusivity and securing even a single sponsor, I would like suggest to this list of alternatives chants, which I made on my PDA on the drive here.”

“The lyrics are clearly allegorical,” said Barry, 60. “This song’s an important strand in the web of British satire – I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to call it positively Swiftian.” The loss of his club’s song has affected young Barry especially strongly, having lost both of his ears to type 12 diabetes earlier this year.

[Pre-chorus]

And this made me da so terrible mad

So he put on his hobnail boots (his hobnail boots)

As objectively good as this new playlist is, several groups have criticised Pilferers FC for “meddling”, decrying this move as an overstep by the nanny state, and literally just like that bendy banana business all over again – and fans are beginning to fight back.

In an organised protest against Chiffon’s authoritarian ruling, Pilferer FC’s fans have ceased singing or chanting anything hateful or aggressive whatsoever, sitting quietly in their seats for the most part before occasionally clapping and expressing warm congratulations whenever someone on either team scores a goal. Ticket sales are up 300% as armchair and pub-going supporters join their ranks to teach the club a lesson.

Minister for Balls, Mark Keyboard, has expressed his sympathy for the movement on X, the Everything App, and plans on bringing the matter to the Prime Minister as soon as Ed Miliband stops holding the door to Number 10 shut and laughing.

Whatever the result of the protests, My Ol’ Da Kicked our Dog to Death will surely remain inexorably linked to Oakham Pilferers football club, despite the dogged censorship it faces from the politically correct left. Is the national anthem next for the chopping block? Will it soon be too racist to sing Happy Birthday? Are golliwogs a bit uncomfortable to see in the window of a B&B? This reporter thinks: maybe (?)

[Chorus]

Dad kicked the dog to death (Repeat x14)

Now let’s all go out and kick dogs to death

Dotcom-crash CONCERN has flooded the markets in the wake of a global pixel shortage.

The LCInc stock index saw its worst fall since Monday with stock values plunging across Virtual Stores and e-commerce webzones on the information superhighway.

Flagellants’ processions have formed spontaneously throughout the Midlands, led by destitute financiers hailing the end of days, and locals with nothing better on.

Protective amulet futures are up 40% and nosegay bonds have climbed by a fifth as spooked traders have sought to move capital into safe haven investments.

I rouse to a sharp alarm at the anointed hour – 0800 Rutland time – an obnoxious dawn for a jobbing journo, but just another day at the pergola for the Rutland Coast Patrol.

I’m here today to accompany Rutland’s crack immigration posse on their daily morning patrol, led by veteran veteran Deagle Lancaster.

He gazes wistfully over the haze of Rutland Water and takes a wistful sip of his Irish coffee, which he prefers to call “English Coffee”.

“On especially foggy days,” he tells me, “you can barely see to the other side. Any number of migrants could be out there.”

They don’t make them like Lancaster any more. He’s ‘Dirty’ Harry Callaghan crossed with Charles Bronson from Death Wish crossed with Charles Bronson from prison. A maquette of chiselled quartz with a voice like shingle and quads of prime brisket.

“Do I have problem with migrants?” He muses. “I wouldn’t say so. Smiffy was born on the Isle of Man and we work with him despite that.”

We march as the chough flies for the crown jewel of his fleet – an HMC Nimrod modified for maximum lethality; nickname: Big Biggie. 

“They say a camel is a horse designed by committee,” Lancaster jokes, “but I would have designed something with more firepower, and which didn’t freak out about mildly loud noises.” 

Big Biggie is a horse designed by a warrior. The hull is padded with seventeen kinds of barbed wire and plate armour that could body block a ballista. On the roof is a swivel-mounted G-Unit Minigun, packing enough ammo to fire for several hundreths of a second. And Biggie boasts the highest number of flags per square inch of any chartered vessel in the UK – a floating fortress of patriotic firepower. Biggie isn’t quite waterborne yet – “the boffins say we need to lose some weight”, Lancaster complains, “but I think the water needs to be more buoyant.”

For now we board a more modestly armed vessel, an HMC Active with a gentle smattering of mounted light machine guns and a humble armoire of KRS-1 grenade launchers.

We blast the outboard motors and head off into the great big blue – and it’s not long before we encounter a suspicious pedalo. Pulses quicken and Lancaster’s squadron leap aboard – three perps are rounded up with lightning precision – one of them gets bashed about a bit for giving some frankly unnecessary backchat and the squad load them onto a tender for processing back at an onshore black site. The pedalo is scuppered in a controlled explosion – “you can never be too careful,” Lancaster explains.

The day charges on with a flurry of similarly racy naval clashes – dinghies and paddleboards are safely destroyed along with a handful of unnapproved migrant fowl. 

The criminals are treated with a firm but fair hand. “Morally”, Lancaster muses, “we’re in international waters. We have no responsibility for keeping these miscreants alive, but if we chucked them overboard, we’d be no better than them.” The squad might look like battle-hardened crusaders to the casual observer – and they are – but they’re also disciplined and highly-trained. 

“Each of these men has undergone several hours of firearms training – combat trained by real Israeli commandos with real PTSD. And I look at most of their Truth Social feeds before I hire them as well. As long as we’re preventing more crimes than we commit, we’re making a net positive impact. Are we there today? No. But I’m optimistic that one day we can be”.

We return to base and I’m quietly glad to step back onto dry land. As I enjoy a cup of Typhoo and tolerate a Morrisons’ own pink wafer, I gratefully ponder how the woke effete milquetoasts back in London sleep peacefully in their silk pyjamas – all because of these rough, rowdy and often angry men, standing ready to do continuous violence on our behalf.

Today, The Hillgrove Files Board and Senior Leadership Team (BaSLT) has finalised the 2024 Hillgrove Files Word Cloud, capturing the zeit and geist of what some are calling the most tumultuous but entertaining annum yet.

For what is a newspaper, if not a cloud of words??

But how does a bustling news-house go about creating such a vital and bold cultural artefact, a veritable Voyager Golden Disk for square-eyed netizens – sweatily clamouring for current affairs? Well, O curious one, take a look inside the mage’s drapes.

Many hands make light word clouds

Such a campaign couldn’t conclude without the combined mastery of a storied regiment of news-hardened press veterans.

The word cloud work stream, known internally as Project Nimbus, was ploughed relentlessly forward by a crack team of 20-40 key stakeholders, imagineers, and dogsbodies – among them Editor Consort Richman Hillgrove, Ayatollah of the Printing Press Alan Jones, Director of Agitprop Sam Hain, Vice President of Kerning Gareth Gates, Office Politics Coordinator Kristie Sergeant, and Junior Junior Marketing Assistant Roy Miles.

With such a dynamic team kettled together for days at a time, there are bound to be polite strategy disagreements, if not occasional violent scuffles. Indeed, amiable disputes over the word cloud led to a complete reshuffle of the board and several resignations in the Senior Leadership Coven, as reported by local gossip rag The Lakewood Papers. Frankly though, we don’t think that was any of their business.

Nevertheless, the steady hand of Richman Hillgrove EC was able to steer the good ship Hillgrove through the rocky seas of conflict and journalistic subterfuge, and into the stable harbour of success.

O the wild charge they made

By February ’24 the team were able to agree that the cloud would consist at least primarily of text – and mere months afterwards a shortlist of 800 candidate words was compiled. The team were able to dynamically adapt to market conditions – by November ’24 initial plans for a granite monolith were scaled back in an agile manner in response to tapering budget availability, opting instead for a more future-facing digital graphic.

Ultimately, the wisdom of the crowds was harnessed, and the project team were able to publish the word cloud only 10 months late in October 2025.

The sense of an ending

The final design includes multiple words; “Words” was included twice for emphasis, reflecting the primary medium of the business. The three colours of taupe, sage and aubergine were chosen to represent the three Core Values of the Hillgrove Files: Temperance, Truth and Words.

The word “amends” was also accidentally included by our graphic designer, but the graphic already had final sign-off, so the decision was made to leave it in place.

Hillgrove Files Chief Editorialiser Richman Hillgrove was “tickled pink” with the team’s tireless work over the course of the 20 month project, and has already announced the start of Project Cumulus, aiming to produce a new word cloud that will commemorate the glowing success of the project.

All UK citizens must carry a set of identification slabs with them at all times, under plans from MP Steve Reed to defend Britain’s farms from foot-and-mouth disease.

The slabs, officially designated as identification monoliths, are made from four inch thick fine-grade granite roughly the same shape and size as tombstone, and are plated with anodised titanium; a full set of seven must be presented to Environment Agency goons during arbitrary spot checks on pain of summary stabbing.

The last recorded case of foot-and-mouth in the UK was in 2007, which was traced to an infected bap wedged in a storm drain. Ministers hope that stopping overencumbered citizens at armoured checkpoints every 70ft will, in conjunction with advanced AI algorithms, help track and prevent any potential outbreaks of the disease before they can happen, even if they weren’t going to in the first place.

The bill is the brainchild of Environment Secretary Steve Reed. “There were no cases of foot-and-mouth in Britain last year,” announced Mr Reed at a constituency Q&A last week. “With all of us rowing in the same direction, let’s bring that down to ‘zero’!”

Most, but not every, human rights group in Europe has declared this new law to be blatantly punitive legislation which targets the electorate. Mr Reed’s department, The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs had been renamed during the leadership of Boris Johnson, who added an additional “o” to the word “Food“. This made it the longest named ministerial department by a single letter, and therefore the most important.

Prime Minister Kier Starmer changed the spelling back following the landslide results of a national referendum, and a red-faced and blubbing Reed announced his foot-and-mouth policy later that day. “You’ll all pay for this!” he shrieked, presumably talking about something else.

The ID slabs themselves come in a set of pretty colours, which certainly makes up for all the masons who perished from acute silicosis and wrist cramp after carving nearly half a billion of them.

Public reaction to this legislation appears mixed. A ministerial report declared a three-month pilot scheme in Rutland a “resounding success” when it resulted in only one confirmed outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, after a contaminated ID slab was dragged across a heath. Fatal hernias went up by 4000%, but overall dissent and personal expression dropped by nearly three quarters.

Citizens will receive their ID slabs as soon as Royal Mail works out why all their postmen are dying.

Associates of an Oakham architect detained in Lincolnshire have requested an urgent meeting with Rutland Council after efforts to negotiate his release fell through during an inter-county ceasefire in late July.

Hamilton Ibex, a self-taught improvisational architect, crossed the border barefoot in December 2024, aiming to build a school where young people in Lincolnshire could learn to light fires and cultivate domesticated plants. Days later, Mr Ibex was gathering giant hogweed fibres and badger wool in order to construct a hyperboloid folly, when he was detained by armed members of the Democratic People’s Army of Lincoln.

Ibex was summarily tried under charges of Espionage, Disturbing the Peace, Obscenity, Blasphemy, and adulterating sausages beyond legal rusk limits, and found guilty in a show trial conducted by warlord and Radio Lincolnshire host John Inverdale.

Lincolnshire council has been criticised for its pattern of detaining the citizens of surrounding counties, often held for years in unsafe and unsanitary premises, like the Skegness Premier Inn, and used as rare loot drops in diplomatic negotiations. 

Representatives of Lincoln County Council Leader “General Ezekiel” deny any accusations of wrongdoing, but say they’ll give him back for a hundred cans of nitrous oxide.

The government needs to stamp out the use of opaque building materials in order to ensure the safety of the nations’ sinless children, Children’s safety thinktank Hands Off!! has said.

Hands Off!! Chief Protection Paladin, Mike Henderson, told some important journalists we were hanging around that “walls have been putting our children at risk for too long, and we need to bloody well put a stop to it, for god’s sake. The government recently introduced measures to stamp out underage access to naughty pictures, and everyone agrees it was a brilliant idea,” Henderson continued, “or are you some kind of a nonce?? Are you a nonce? Nonce!”

Hands Off!! warn that behind closed (and opaque) doors, children could be getting up to anything. Your kids are probably strung out on heroin upstairs right now, engaging in sick roleplay with a bunch of online predators – and it’s all your fault really.

Hands Off!! propose new child-friendly safety cubes, with glass walls and a padded floor. For optimum safety, the children within should be kept in a natural and unclothed state to stop them smuggling in illicit filth, the little angels. The glass walls will act as one-way mirrors, so that the innocent babes can’t be polluted with malicious content from outside of the cube, though diligent parents may monitor their activities from outside to ensure optimum safety.

Government Technology and Innovation Minister Sir Montague Croft, 97, is all in favour of the new proposals. He told us: “the safety of children is of paramount importance to this government, and we’ll never stop doing things until all the children are safe. If you’ve got an idea we’ll bloody well do it. We’re not sickos!”

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.

---

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.}

Markets across Rutland and the Greater Whoft area have dropped tens of percentage points following the death of Teepee, Lipton Crumb Industrial Concern’s famous Bwindi gorilla.

Teepee, who had been alive for 14 years before not being alive now, was a familiar sight in the offices of Lipton Crumb, a company which operates an index of the 50 most least-unprofitable companies in the county.

In a sad sight far from her heyday of making nests from shredded documents and violently striking employees who startled her, the beloved massive ape slipped away peacefully after drinking a large bottle of printing toner, briefly convulsing, and crawling into the corner to slowly die.

Teepee was found when markets opened the next day, her body stiffened and toppled over by rigor mortis, wedging open the door to the stock room, and providing convenient access for a Staples delivery. Her final act, one of kindness? If you ask Grant Sheldon, floor manager, there was no ape kinder.

But we won’t ask Grant, because trading floors around Whoft would soon be reeling from the tragic news. Before Lipton analysts had time to carefully formulate a plan to break the news without provoking a bear market, Local grass Simon Kendall spunked the proverbial when he published this post on his personal webforum:

so sad to hear about your death, Teepee. I do hope nothing bad happens to Lipton Crumb’s market capital!!! XD

Kendall now lingers in swotter’s jail on a ten-stretch.

Swathes of investors, losing all confidence in the indexing ability of company that couldn’t even stop an ape from dying, began to pull their money from several major mutual and exchange-traded funds, which had until now traded on the success of The LCInc.

In a desperate attempt to claw back investment, Lipton Crumb commissioned The Jim Henson Company to fabricate a life-sized mechanised muppet of Teepee, which was to be erected at the entrance to the offices to assuage the panic and “bring her peaceful aura back from the grave”. Due to a clerical error, the puppet ended up being 30ft tall and could only express “mournful” and “pained” expressions. Delivered and installed in the lobby by Chinook, the animatronic was found to be blocking several fire exits and required unreasonable amounts of kerosene to operate, and the building was subsequently condemned.

Unfortunately, none of this helped.

By this morning, LCInc has dropped 7598 points, representing more than half of its market capital. Several top players in the index have been hit especially hard, with Saddiq’s Brown Rums and darling of the Silcon Fen iBootScrapr currently fending off the bailifs with improvised polearms and cauldrons of hot lead.

The decreased confidence has also left other markets reeling, with the PigSmash and Sludges indices down 605 and 102 points respectively. PTSlimeInc has remained bullish, however, reflecting the popularity of goo and slime as a hedge against market uncertainty.

Lipton Crumb remains optimistic, expecting the market to recover within two to three working decades, and has ritualistically burned their CFO in a wicker photocopier.

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”.