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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 heavily encumbered 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. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We at The Files ask – why not more?

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 minutes later, Kevin was declared biologically dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dearest reader,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.