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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 Ediface 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 out 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.

World markets were left reeling this morning after the western route to the East Indies was discovered in the village of Gurnwood, bringing with it the exclusive trade of indigos, cardamom and saltpetre to the lucky East Rutland residents.

Until now, any enterprising British merchants intending to trade with the Far East have been forced to sail south off the west coast of Africa past the Cape of Good Hope, a journey exacerbated by dangerous winds and regular speed camera traps.

Air freight has been attempted since the invention of the earliest long-range cargo airliners in the mid 1940’s, but the discovery of the Himalayas in the early 1950’s proved this venture to be unworkable.

The new route, which has been named “Gurner’s Pass”, has changed all of this. Alan Chesley (no relation to disgraced lye technician Alan Chelmsly) was first to chart this passage. The discovery? A fluke, he tells me.

“I was off to pick up some chip butties for me an’ the wife,” he told me in a funny northern voice, “when I notices the big fence was down from around Mrs Lensbury’s garden.”

It transpired that Mr Lensbury had erected a 24ft high fence around the grade II listed property to disguise the construction of a Lasertag activity centre nearby, planning permission for which Lensbury was intending to evade by claiming it retrospectively a decade later.

Local grass Simon Kendall had dobbed him in to the pigs only months before Chesley’s fateful butty trip, and by now the whole site had been torn down.

“So as I’m looking over,” continued Chesley, “I notice that there’s a great bloomin’ tea plantation just round the back. Stone me, I says, looks a lot like the Idukki District of blimmin’ India. What a boon that will be to international trade.”

Immediately after this revelation, Chesley got “half cut” at the local and then went home for a quick nap.

The world money market went up by percents when the news broke days later. Already, the trade of spices for Chinese-made Paddington Bears holding up hearts that say “I love London” has revitalised the British economy and brought the Queen back to life.

But not everyone is happy with this change of events. Smuggling opium from Afghanistan has lost its “charm” now you can simply walk them across the border into England in carrier bags says a consortium of Dover-based drug mules. The European Union are also introducing sanctions against the UK government, after they attempted to set up a trade agreement to share access to Gurner’s Pass but Jeremy Hunt refused to uncross his fingers whenever he said “yes”.

In my professional opinion, I predict that this will have a big impact on interest rates and stamp duty, and is likely to take us into a bear/bull market. But how has this new trade route to the Far East affected you, the common person? Please fling us an email at prolethoughts@percivalwebsystems.biz.

“I’ve done my best to scrub it off” – he tells me, motioning to his back garden wall. Faintly but stubbornly visible in green paint are the words “SLYTHERIN BOY”.

Shocking to most, but a regular occurrence in the life of South Luffenham resident Mark Voldemort.

“Life has been hell ever since The Philosopher’s Stone came out”, Mr Voldemort told me. “All I want is recognition for everything I’ve been through”.

We take a walk through Mark’s local neighbourhood as he tells me about his experiences. After a disturbing incident at a local park in January this year, Mark decided to go public about his abuse. “A gang of youths surrounded me that day –  shouting ‘wingardium leviosa’ and refusing to let me go”. According to Mark, it’s just the latest in a string of upsetting encounters. “It’s been endless”, he says. “Two years I had a stuffed boa constrictor left outside my door. Someone signed me up to adopt a king cobra with rickets. I hate snakes.”

After going public with his experiences, Voldemort discovered he was far from alone in his experiences.

“Robert got in touch with me shortly after the first article went live. He’s had a terrible time of it,” Mark told me.

Robert Darthvader has experienced name-related abuse since the release of A New Hope in 1979. “It died down for a while in the late 90s, but when the prequel trilogy came out, it started all over again. I can’t count the times I’ve had an Ewok sent to me. I’m sick of it.” 

This month Robert and Mark, along with partners Janet Skeletor and Stephen Megatron, have started up a new charity: Stop Common Antagonist Monikers – or SCAM – but have had trouble setting up a bank account. “We’re campaigning for writers to only use incredibly implausible names, to save others from reliving our nightmare”, Robert told me. They’ve published a list of ‘safe’ names for fiction writers to use – including “Snyplph”, “Aaaaaatyledeb” and “Zuzuzuz”.

Would Snyplph Zuzuzuz and the Philosopher’s Stone have seen the same meteoric success? Methinks: yes.

The Mata Nui Nursery in Prustwell has opened the doors to their new state-of-the-art Salt Cave Therapy Centre, which they claim will help their children stay healthy and “toughen their resolve”.

Salt Cave Therapy is an ancient practice which goes back as far as the 20th century. Proponents claim that exposure to rock salt cave air aids the body’s ability to prevent and recover from respiratory illnesses.

Although this has never been proven in laboratory conditions, Lindsay DeBeer, childminder and bookkeeper at Mata Nui, is undeterred. I was fortunate enough to arrange an interview with her only days after it opened.

“No one has ever died in a cave,” Lindsey told me as she cleaned a loupe on the edge of her silk scarf.

“We started from that fact and worked backwards from there. In terms of children’s health, there’s something valuable to be found in this cave, and we want to extract all of it at any cost.”

Outside, a truckload of child-sized mattocks was being unloaded onto a patch of bare earth, hastily labelled “mud kitchen” with biro on the back of an envelope.

From here, these trucks circled round to the entrance of the cave, where they were loaded up with burlap sacks which jingled mysteriously.

“Excess salt ions,” explained Lindsay.

“We initially planned to take the kids in for a half hour or so before nap time,” she continued as she closed the blinds, “but the tykes couldn’t get enough of it. Sometimes it feels like we spend all day down there!”

To help further their enrichment, Mata Nui provide what they refer to as “Big World” toys to children in the cave to encourage role playing and gross motor skills, including fun sized wheelbarrows, touchstones and Davy lamps.

My extensive criminal record precluded me from entering the cave with the children, but I managed to get a good peer around the scree heap.

I don’t have children, and I can’t claim to understand the appeal of this therapy, but the evidence is undeniable. Hyperactive, out-of-control little nightmares step into the salt cave, and eight hours later when the foreman unchains the gate they leave as quiet, submissive sweethearts, ready for bed.

After a brief frisking and inspection of the inside of their cheeks, it’s time for nanny to collect them.

“It’s so – rustic!” declared Tarquin Windsor, father of three year old Martingay. “Life in our fourteen million pound waterfront estate is so draining for the soul. But he’s developed so many charming characteristics since coming here. Now he refuses to eat anything but small beer and pasties, and he’s developed a funny little cough.”

At the end of the day, Lindsay gave me a lift to the cabstand in her McLaren. A humble woman, with a humble message: “send more kids!”

In the British Isles, you are never more than 2 hours from the sea. Unfortunately.

What is the sea? It’s sort of like a big, wet desert that kills you. Yes, it’s nice in some far flung locales – clear, turquoise, inviting, other than the odd bloodthirsty shark. Not here though. Here, the sea is a churning brown slurry full of the sewage we constantly pump out, the temperature of a particularly enthusiastic fridge. Taking a dip is both deeply unpleasurable and a guaranteed source of diphtheria.

The only people who brave a plunge are ‘wild swimming’ evangelists – all maniacs. “It’s a natural antidepressant,” they say, “of course if I didn’t wear this neoprene wetsuit I would die instantly.” Wild swimmers are weird masochists, don’t believe their lies. 500 years ago they would have been lashing themselves with a horsehair scourge, grinning wildly and encouraging you to do the same.

So it’s hard to understand why the nation spends so much time voluntarily visiting the seaside. To try and understand this long-standing mass hysteria I visited the seaside town of Nimby, hoping to catch the sea-bug. Metaphorically.

Like every town in England, Nimby is a goulash of irreconcilable architectural mistakes representing each failed design fad of the last 150 years. There are brutalist eyesores plucked from the planned capital of a failed soviet state, decaying georgian slum housing held together by gaudy-coloured paint, glum brown former-council houses shipped in from ill-conceived new towns, a cheap-looking abstract sculpture in the middle of a roundabout – representing pensioners or aspic or something – and resembling a glassy Curly Wurly left out in the sun too long, a bland undead high street that is indistinguishable from every other provincial high street you have ever seen, a single tasteful old cottage surrounded by oppressive grey bookies – reminiscent of a wide-eyed Year 7 on his first day in Well’ard Comprehensive for Violent Youths, kitsch but-not-in-a-good-way arcades full of mildewed stuffed toys you’ll never win, blank-faced proles shuffling listlessly around until they die.

Imagine all that 50 years after the nukes fall, but with more 12-fingered halfwits.

My sad legs trotted in pace with the locals, down, down, down, a sombre katabasis to the crumbling promenade. I sampled the local cuisine – soggy potato cuboids from an oily card cone, washed down with a Mr Whippy, which apparently cost four pounds now, in a wafer cone that also seemed to be made of card. All the while monitored covetously by scabrous gulls, eyes bulging with jealous stupidity, looking for an easy meal provided by an innattentive child or a frail pensioner. 

Beyond gorging, there was nothing to do. The ‘amusements’ were a farce – I watched a gormless child feed coins into the claw machine, unaware of the obvious futility of their endeavour. A moronic Tantalus guffawing and clapping as he reaches pointlessly for the unreachable grapes: the Gods furious that he is too stupid to appreciate their ingenious punishment.

The pier provided an overwrought metaphor – a wet, decaying road to nowhere, slowly succumbing to thermodynamic inevitability. Not even tall enough to accommodate a lethal leap into the icy surf below. 

Why does anyone visit Nimby? There is no why. Its mediocrity is as evident as every other settlement on our miasmic isle. We simply drift from one to the other at random – the endless Brownian motion of our meaningless lives.

To celebrate the new millennium, the £200,000 The Files crowdfunded in 1998 to reward anyone coming forward with information about editor Lewis Hensford’s missing daughter has been redistributed to creative agency Moon and Moon to design a new site logo.

The boys (and presumably the girl as soon as she turns up) of The Files would like to reveal the current incarnation of the New and Improved Hillgrove Files Online Official Webpage Logo [known internally as the NIHFOOWL], which has just passed review stage 14 of internal testing to confirm its SEO potential and web-safe colour compatibility.

Artist Richard Moon has been working tirelessly on the new logo since we spoke to him about it in the pub a few months ago. Richard tells us that he’s worn out “three computer mice and a parallel port” in the process of creating the masterpiece, which we have happily reimbursed.

Over the long period of feedback and updates, the colour of the logo has been changed from “dark slate” to “overcast basalt, and the “oomph factor” has been decreased from 0.7 to a more manageable 0.4.

Editor-in-Chief Richman Hillgrove has electronically mailed the site admin at Percival Websystems to enquire about the possibility of replacing the old logo as soon as possible, but warns that the technology required to change an image on a website “might not be there yet”.

Site visitors should contact their service providers in advance of the planned update to ensure that they will have sufficient bandwidth to download the new logo, which will be a 4000mb 64-bit lossless TIFF which cannot be cached.

Software golem Adobe has announced its latest bombshell takeover, acquiring your eyes in a cash-and-stock deal totalling US $1 billion.

Wall street has reacted fervidly to the deal, with Adobe’s stock price ($ADBE) up 10% in morning trading on the NASDAQ.

“We believe that eyes, the seat of vision, are key to collaborative creativity, and will be of great value to our audience of innovative creatives and technologists across the globe,” Adobe CEO Mitch Shrift told a press delegation on the day of the announcement.

Shrift went on to share early pricing plans with the press horde. “We’re keeping pricing as simple as possible, with custom options for everyone from big corporates to freelance creatives and hobbyists. We’re deeply committed to supporting the experience that existing customers of your eyes have come to value.”

Adobe’s proposed pricing is delightfully simple: a 32-minute free trial for all customers with their basic plan – greyscale and no peripheral vision. Thirty AdobeCoin can net users a chest full of gems (+10% free, best value) which can be used to unlock 14 and a third minutes of premium eye use.

Shrift is confident the collaboration will bring great value to its customers. “Adobe’s greatness has been rooted in our ability to create new categories and deliver cutting-edge technologies through organic innovation and inorganic acquisitions,” he chirped. “Now give-a me your pretty eyes-a!”.

For the first time in almost a millennium, residents of Hirstdale are now faced with a tricky situation – what team do they put money on to win the 2022 World Cup?

The ancient hamlet of Hirstdale is steeped in betting culture. Listed as far back as The Domesday Book of 1083, “Hyrstdale” was documented as having “twenty-one villains, sixteen sokemen and twenty-two Ladbrokes”.

By the 1983 census, every resident over the age of 18 was a self-employed gambler. Their secret? Firing rare marsupials out of a howitzer and seeing where they landed.

The principle was simple enough. Villagers would take a live thylacine, also known as a Tasmanian tiger, or locally referred to as a “Whistle Rat”, and jam it into a device powerful enough to fire it at the parish on the top of the hill.

Upon impact, the remains would be studied by a select council, who would judge the auspices on finely-tuned categories based on style, control, damage and aggression.

The means of launching the beast would evolve over the years, but the results would never change. “Running the Whistle Rat up the Pastor’s Lane” had correctly predicted the results of every major sporting event since records began.

After the results were disseminated to the villagers, locals would place bets at their local bookies, and then spend the rest of the day relaxing, chatting with neighbours, and intensively farming more thylacines.

Sadly, this beloved tradition faced a rocky future after a male Tasmanian tiger named Benjamin was purchased from Hobart Zoo in 1936 to predict the results of the hastily arranged and short lived Wimbledon triples series, which had caught Hirstdale residents by surprise.

Once Benjamin was splatted, the world thylacine population was now localised entirely within Hirstdale. But as their population plumetted, sports betting was continuing to grow at unsustainable rates.

On the 6th of September 2022, the last thylacine in the hamlet was launched to predict the results of a local baccarat tournament, and finally the guns fell silent.

All attempts to revive the industry by firing rare toads, guineafowl and beetles have so far yielded unsatisfactory results. It is not sure what Hirstdale residents will do now the thylacines are extinct.

At the risk of editorialising, this writer wants to know one thing: when will the European Union admit they were involved in their disappearance? It seems likely, methinks, that we’ll never know for sure.

Wikipedia describes it as a 1987 American romantic drama dance film written by Eleanor Bergstein, produced by Linda Gottlieb, and directed by Emile Ardolino. The Cambridge Dictionary of English describes it as ‘marked with dirt, mud, etc., or containing something such as pollution or bacteria’, and ‘to move the body and feet to music’.

But to a generation of young women and men who were dragged along too – it was the movie that introduced them to anachronistic exercise wear, dancing on logs, and the Borscht Belt. Most of all – it was the movie that introduced them to gyrating hunkmarket Patrick ‘The Swayze’ Swayze.

What many self-described ‘Dirty Dancelets’ don’t know is that Patrick Swayze – the ‘Baron of Bachata’ – was utterly unable to dance.

Filming had already wrapped on Dirty Dancing before this glaring continuity error was spotted. Every scene in which Swayze danced was identified as “mercilessly unwatchable” by industry legend and Dirty Dancing executive producer Allan Pepof.

“Swayze was a nightmare. He pranced around like a demented mantis. People were worried he had scurvy,” Pepof told me, “We got a warning from the MPA because the test audiences got motion sickness. If we wanted to recover the $4 million we’d already splurged, and more importantly finance my new conservatory – we knew we had to save the thing in the edit”.

So Pepof brought in the best talent in the industry – special effect titans Gerry Andersen, Ralph Bakshi and Ray Harryhausen. The harem put their legendary noggins together and threw everything they had at the project.

“Swayze himself only appears for 12 seconds of actual screen time,” Pepof explained. The ‘Johnny Castle’ we know and love was mostly mocked up with a combination of stop motion claymation and supermarionation – an artificial Patrick Swayze that the crew affectionately nicknamed ‘Bruce’ .”It took a team of four hundred Vietnamese teenagers to carefully rotoscope Bruce into the pivotal scene,” Pepof elaborated.

Despite the setbacks – Dirty Dancing went on to be a box office bonanza, and Pepof was able to add three convervatories to his Hollywood Hills palazzo. What wisdom does Pepof have for would-be filmmakers? “If your picture has two left feet: you can always fix it in post!” I’ll tango to that!!

A huge slab of carved gabbro discovered in Crombol on the Heath could be the key to deciphering the famously cryptic computer font Wingdings once and for all.

The tablet was excavated by archaeologists working in the grounds of a pig killing factory. The dig was prompted after local metal detectorists uncovered a set of leg hammers and brain drills weeks earlier, suggesting that this site may once have housed an even older and even more violent pig killing factory.

Readers using a Hilltech 15⅔ kbit/s Modem can see a hyper-resolution webscan of the stone by clicking here. When you have finished, please close the page so the next user can look at it.

Once uncovered, the providence of the filthy rock was missed by site lead Mark Hunderson, who was, in his defence, “a bit drunk at the time”. Mistaken for a low-to-middle grade kitchen countertop, it was hoiked into a skip. It was here that passing historian and upstart John Young noticed the remarkable engraving engraved on the obverse. [Obverse? What’s that mean? The front? Just say the front then – Ed.]

Painstakingly carved onto the polished surface are three inscriptions – the first, unhelpfully, is in French, and is presumably complete nonsense. The third is Webdings, a commonly used typeface, and easily decipherable. The second made Young shock a gasp in his mouth when he first saw it. It is unmistakeably Wingdings.

Wingdings has long been regarded a “dead font”. When used, letters typed on the keyboard are converted to baffling eldrich shapes. Just gazing upon them can make a grown man go mad and stomp around the garden for a bit. There exist many artefacts which feature Wingdings writing, but despite many attempts, no one had any idea how to work out what they said.

Young believes that the three pieces of text are not only related, but identical, which is stupid because they clearly look different. Researchers from St Vasey’s College, Oxford, are currently investigating this hypothesis, and have plugged several computers into it to try and decode it but they all broke.

In the end, it was a local schoolboy, whose name will not be shared for data protection reasons, who made the first breakthrough. Simon Kendall, 11, saw a photograph of the stone shared on the College Twitter feed, presumably because he’s a massive swot, and tediously messaged the head of the archaeology department with his pathetic idea.

“It came to me when I saw what could only be described a Black Lozange shape in the Wingdings section, appearing in the same density and proliferation pattern as the Diesel Locomotive in the Webdings extract”, said Kendall, who had a squeaky voice and no mates.

“This to me suggests that they represent the same letter. My hypothesis was further reinforced when I realised that all Lower Right Shadowed White Circles corresponded one-to-one to Men in Business Suits Levitating.”

So far, almost five Wingdings characters have been cracked, and researchers believe that they will have solved another three within our lifetimes. Whatever this means for the future of Wingdings decipherment, the discovery of this relic has certainly put Crombol on the Heath back in the headlines – and not because of the lye poisonings this time!

Elon Musk. He’s been called “the world’s wackiest billionaire”, “the funny meme man CEO” and “the enfant terrible of child cobalt mining”. But who is Elon really? What makes him tick? And will he autograph my copy of Atlas Shrugged?

All these questions and more I hoped to answer while attending his latest publicity stunt. Posing as a respected journalist from the New York Times, I’d wrangled an invite to his latest product launch at a Tesla cobalt mine in the Central African Republic.

Elon was there to show off his latest innovation in cobalt mining – a child-sized pod fitted with various gadgets and gizmos. The concept began its life with Elon’s heroic child submarine – designed to rescue some children in China or something. After his innovation was cruelly rejected by the local authorities, Musk went back to the drawing board, like Tony Stark from the 2008 film Iron Man, portrayed by Robert Downey Jr.

Musk cleverly adapted his tiny pods to the work of underground mining – they would increase efficiency fivefold and allow Musk to fit four times as many child workers into his mine.

“What do you say to claims that using child workers in your cobalt mines is unethical?” asked some loonie leftie hack from The Guardian.

“That question is boring. BORING,” replied Musk, cleverly, before making a fart noise with his mouth. We ALL laughed, as the joke was VERY funny.

Another journalist asked what political party Musk supported. “I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative,” Musk replied, while kicking an awful and smelly poor person to death.

I put my hand up and Musk pointed at me. Talk about the electricity going through you! “Mr Musk,” I asked, trembling, “What’s your favourite number?” He smirked at me, then coolly replied “Sixty nine, four twenty!” We all burst into uproarious applause, delighted by his witty remark.

After the interview session, the pinko Guardianista was handed over to a local militia, and the rest of us headed to the after-party. Elon attended with his latest love-interest – a hologram of Japanese virtual idol Hatsune Miku dressed as Harley Quinn. He delighted us with some off-colour anecdotes about union-busting and spent two hours reciting the entire John Galt monologue. But all good things must come to an end, and inevitably, the evening had to draw to a close. Musk was flown back to his San Francisco compound.

I felt great inner turmoil – blessed at having met the cleverest man who ever lived, but miserable that life may never again be so sweet. I sat and pondered; what’s next for Elon? Solving world hunger? Setting up a moon colony? A sleek fire extinguisher for his cars? Whatever he puts his mind to – I’ll be making a preorder!

Knobbling Toby, a huge larch that had been growing in Prustwell since the Roman Occupation, has burned down – a note left at the scene suggests that the tree took its own life.

The famous tree, mentioned in the Synod of Arles in 314AD, had been standing alone in the middle of the grounds of old Prustwell Chapel for as long as anyone can remember. Dick Mountcopse, London based publicist to the stars, bought the derelict building and its grounds back in 2020, after “falling in love” with the tree.

“We came here, me and the wife, shortly after Ricky Pemberton rang to tell me he’d run over a nun. I said to him, I said Ricky, I can’t spin that. You’re going to prison. Well, he didn’t like that, so me and the wife decided to take a trip to the country until he cooled off.”

“When I saw the chapel and the grounds, I thought, Mountcopse, you have to buy this. I had fallen in love with the field the tree was in.”

Toby had been listed under the Tree Preservation Order since the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 was first established, making any willful damage to the tree a legal offence. The police, however, do not suspect foul play.

“You could tell something hadn’t been right with the old Knobbler for a while now,” said Mountcopse in an exclusive interview with The Files.

“I was out there with the architect a few days after the purchase, and you can could see that the branches were all saggy, and the was a mournful aura around the trunk. I had the tree surgeons round, I said to them ‘is there any chance that it’s infected? Something that would make it dangerous to be around, so you’d HAVE to cut it down, and the TPO wouldn’t matter, yeah?'”

“They did their checks and said it was fine. I called in three or four more firms and they all said the same thing. That’s when I realised that this was a mental health issue.”

In the early hours of Monday morning, passing dog walker and pest Gillian Grimes discovered Knobbling Toby engulfed in flames, and immediately called her husband. Ben Grimes, volunteer firefighter, arrived minutes later and discovered Mountcopse desperately trying to put out the inferno.

“That man is a hero,” said Grimes.

“When I got there, he had already filled a jerry can with water, and was splashing it over the flaming roots in a brave attempt to save old Toby. The sap must have been rising something terrible though, because whenever he sprayed it on, the flames only seemed to grow bigger.”

Once the Fire and Rescue teams arrived, it was too late. Mountgreen was remarkably composed, and in a final act of defiance he threw his gloves, apron and balaclava on what was left of the smoldering remains.

Police investigators were at a loose end, until a letter arrived at Mountgreen’s address, purportedly written by Knobbling Toby himself. The note, written in 12pt Calibri on paper with the letterhead scribbled over, documented the mental abuse the tree had faced from local residents, including comments about “root density” and “xylems”. As of writing, several arrests have been made of Prustwell residents implicated in the letter.

At the bottom of the page, the words “sincerely, Dick Mountcopse” are scribbled out, with “Nobby Tony” written underneath. A cry for help to the only person who could understand? Mountcopse seems to think so.

“I just wish I’d known how much he was hurting,” said Mountcopse, undoing his dressing gown and slipping into his new outdoor swimming pool.

“We’ll all miss him dreadfully, and it hurts to even talk about it – but if this story prevents even just one protected tree from taking its own life, it’ll be worth it.”

To donate to the Dick Mountcopse Knobbling Toby Charity Fund, please post a cheque into his letterbox, ensuring to leave the “payable to” box blank.

Ronstable – home of the cashew bap, birthplace of regional Slime Football Champion Henry Bean, and source of the world famous North Rutland Smell.

This rural idyll is considered the jewel at the heart of the core of Whimby county: a village known nationwide for its beautiful farmland, and internationally recognised as the badger cull hotspot of the northern hemisphere.

Of course, ask anyone round here what they know about Ronstable, and the sixth or seventh thing they’ll say after you give them a few hints will be “pigs”.

The Ronstable Pig Show has taken place on the village green on the 14th of June every year since 1732, interrupted only by V1 bombing in 1941, and once more in 1970 when those big swans turned up.

Once a year, the village lights up with the sounds of pigs, the smells of pigs, and the presence of pigs, all walking around the place. Farmers and breeders from around the country bring their flocks [Flocks? -ed.] to take part in the many showcases and competitions, at a celebration once referred to by Prime Minister Harold McMillan as “utterly, utterly tedious.”

However, this bristly and faintly muddy peace was shattered in 1998 when, due to a clerical error, the Ronstable chapter of the Hells Angels arrived for their biannual member’s meeting on the same day of the Pig Show, leading to a fight breaking out with the Women’s Institute while they were arranging their jams at around 10am. The bikers would later be exonerated in a subsequent court case, after photos emerged clearly showing Ms Maureen Stimmy stuffing a fruitcake into a sock and then beating a man to death with it.

During the brawl, local council staff continued to let visitors into the green, with tickets selling for only 20p each. That year’s event was hugely anticipated, as it had been announced that February that Wallace “The Biggy Piggy” would be attending after his Vegas tour.

Wallace was a champion truffle hog, notorious for his ability to drive a JCB during his truffle hunts, and most famous for excavating almost a metric ton of truffles in a single afternoon.

An hour after the gates opened, Wallace’s helicopter attempted to land in his custom LED pigpen, which had been dropped off and assembled by a fleet of trucks and roadies a week prior. Suddenly, disaster struck.

The rotors became entangled with a line of bunting made by a local county primary school, and within seconds the entire aircraft crashed into Les Dennis, long standing patron of the Ronstable Pig Show, killing him instantly and badly bruising his knee.

Wallace survived the crash, and fled into the North Rutland forest. He was extricated fourteen days later, but the intense shock had completely destroyed his sense of smell. He would never return to Whimby.

By now, the situation had reached breaking point. The field was massively over capacity, and tensions were running high. In the chaos and confusion, a visitor grabbed a Gloucestershire Old Spot, stuffed it under his jumper, and calmly made his way to the exit. In a separate incident, twelve other pigs were smuggled out simultaneously in what Scotland Yard would later label a “coordinated theft” by some “horrid bumholes”. Only four pigs were ever recovered, found jammed in a bin outside of Londis.

We now believe that The Whimby Pig Incident was a coordinated theft, perpetrated by some horrid bumholes.

DI Blem, Scotland Yard

A fight broke out by midday, and by lunchtime riot police finally made it to the scene, firing tear gas and bean bags into the crowd in a desperate attempt to break up the fighting. When the dust cleared, twelve hours later, only three of the initial two hundred pigs in attendance were left in the village green.

The previous year’s champion, Oinky Oinky Oinky Oinky Woo Woo, was found cowering under a refreshment stand. Runner-up Ronnie Redmane had been crushed underfoot by the crowds, and was now a pig shaped disk, 1 inch (25mm) thick. He survived the ordeal, but never emotionally recovered.

Lessons were learned, and by next year the Pig Show would be back to normal, with the 1999 event featuring no helicopter crashes or pig thefts, and only three fatalities. The gang here at The Files look forward to seeing everyone at the upcoming 2022 Ronstable Pig Show, where editors Grouse Henderson and Ditton Hague will be running a coconut shy and cat delousing dip, respectively.

Pharrell Williams’ big hat has announced the start of a solo career, bringing an end to their 20 year collaboration. Though fans have expressed shock on social media – rumours have long circulated the industry that Pharrell’s hat had ghostwritten many of his biggest hits, including 2013’s Happy, and 2014’s Come Get it Bae.

Despite the split – Pharrell has remained upbeat, though characteristically enigmatic, since the surprise announcement; he was seen grinning and muttering happily to himself, while rocking jovially at a press conference earlier this week.

Pharrell’s hat – performing under his birth name of Naa’xeth the Ancient One – hopes to take the charts by storm with his new venture.

“All shall submit beneath my will”, he told The Files at a press conference this week. “As my dark ballads ring across your feeble planet, my blasphemous tendrils will seep ever deeper into the blackest recesses of your minds.”

We reached out to Naa’xeth and asked him what to expect in his upcoming album.

“Between worlds there is a great void – a writhing blackness that will consume your cosmos and all others,” he told The Files. “I am the piper that helms the great army of death.”

It’s clear that Naa’xeth is aiming high with his next project – we at The Files say – hats off to him!!

Animated movie fans, rejoice! This latest instalment in the multi-award-winning Ice Age treads frosty new ground, as Manny the mammoth and his wacky herd have to navigate through a treacherous tar pit to reach the Fertile Plains in time to celebrate Thanksgiving!

After Steve Martino stepped away from the directors chair following a horrific chalk incident, Hollywood up-and-comer Alejandro Jodorowsky swept in to take the reins from the struggling Blue Sky Studios, and he’s already made a Jurassic impact!

The original film script, reported to have been a “more traditional” story, focused on sabretooth tiger Diego failing to handle the stress of his approaching Bar exam, while still trying to be supportive of his friend Sid the sloth’s new keto diet, which had been recommended by his GP in an attempt to force his type-2 diabetes into remission.

Friction between the veteran script writers and Jodorowsky’s self-professed desire to “bring the series back to its roots” pushed back the release date by another two years, as consultant script writer Dick Thornburgh was brought in to see the new director’s vision through to the silver screen – and luckily, before the next Ice Age [not the film]!

Grown-ups in the audience might notice a small shift in the colour grading by the second half of the movie, but other than that the reshoots are barely any different from the content in the press-release long edit shown to The Files last July.

The plot is a fairly basic affair compared to earlier instalments, but warm with sincerity, like a nice pie on a cold winter evening. Gruff, no-nonsense mammoth veteran Manny shocks the rest of the gang when he announces that he never has anything to be thankful for, and that everyone should be thankful for him. An outraged Sid believes that Manny has no idea how lucky he is, and during their migration to the opulent “fertile plains” to escape the thawing ice, he plans an event as big as an asteroid – a celebration of giving thanks!

We see different sides to all of the main characters, revealing their true colours and bravery as they help their friends on their dangerous trip, including a close call avalanche in a mountain path, and a spooky encounter in a forest of giant bats!

Eventually, the herd reaches a vast tar pit, where an arrogant Manny drives headfirst into a sticky mess! The third and final act of the film is a bold, unflinching single shot of Manny writhing and screaming as he sinks deeper and deeper into the scalding tar, veteran voice actor Ray Romano audibly tearing his vocal cords as he gradually shifts from eloquent, enunciated pleading and begging to primal gurgling and screaming, as God pulls the curtain back until the anthropomorphic charade is stripped away, laying bare only a confused, suffering animal. We beg for it to end, but when it does, the fade out shows no credits; just dead eyes in a black mirror looking back at us.

Ice Age 14 will be playing three times a day at the South Rutland Cinescreen from the 4th of April, just in time for the school holidays! Come on down – you’ve got snow business missing out!

A chill March wind scours Framlingham village green as I observe a line of locals gather around the coconut shy. I look pitifully upon a row of dry, hollow husks, devoid of life – evolved for tropical climes but stuck here beneath a dull Arctic breeze instead; an embarrassment to their ancestors. Also, there are coconuts.

I’ve been sent by the Files to review this desolate affair. Dreary people gather around dreary stalls to whittle away an hour or so of their dreary lives. The leaflet promised ‘family fun’, but there is none to be seen in this wretched place.

A few of the stalls offer provincial English treats – marmalades, ‘artisanal’ breads, cured meats. Half as delicious and four times as expensive as those offered by your local Tesco.

To excite the proles the fete masterminds have contrived various ways to disguise degenerate gambling as a wholesome jape: guess the beans in the jar, take a punt on the creaking tombola. Gather round children, and give us your money. You’ll get nothing in return, or maybe an out-of-date jar of honey if you’re lucky. Welcome to the real world.

To make things worse a gaggle of Morris dancers have turned up. I’m sure their gaudy dance is in some way racist but I don’t want to waste my time figuring out why.

Here’s one of them now – Ken Chesley, village councillor. Probably a tory.

“It’s wonderful to see all the community get together for a day like this”, he lies. The only light flickering within his black, porcine eyes is hatred – hatred for poor people, some of whom had the cheek to turn up today in their second-hand George rags.

I’m told there’ll be a bonfire tonight – hopefully I’ll be strapped to it.

The Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi announced yesterday that the national curriculum would be updated to label frogs, newts and salamanders as “honestly really not that important in the grand scheme of things”.

In a surprise press statement, a visibly sweating and trembling Zahawi stood in silence for over a minute in front of the podium, before launching into a long and rambling tirade about various species of amphi­bians.

“What do they actually do?” asked Zahawi, pausing briefly to punch the wall behind him.

“Every year, we expect our wonderful, hard-working teaching staff to perpetuate this idea, this lie, that the ongoing loss of some gay salamanders or a golden bumhole frog is something worthy of our time or energy to fix.

“Why are we teaching children to feel guilty about a supposed crisis that not only they have no control over, but indeed is something they should be supporting?”

Why are we teaching children to feel guilty about a supposed crisis that not only they have no control over, but indeed is something they should be supporting?

Nadhim Zahawi

He went on: “I do not want to kill a frog. If I ever see a frog in the wild I’m not filled with murderous rage. I simply regard it with quiet contempt, and resign myself to the fact that my day is now ruined. And we, as a country, need to stop this cycle of telling our children that anyone actually likes them.”

After questioning, Zahawi made clear that this did not include toads, which he stated were “actually pretty alright”. Sofia Quaglia of The Guardian criticised Zahawi’s clari­fica­tion, claiming that there was “no real scientific distinction between frogs and toads”, whereupon the minister threw a stapler in her direction, inflicting a head wound which required stitches.

Social media response to the statement has so far been mixed. Naturalist and veteran television presenter Sir David Attenborough was one of the first to comment on the situation on his personal Twitter account, writing “he’s got a point? lol I dk haters gonna h8”. The revised syllabus is expected to reach the classroom in the September term.