Lengthy Review Process

Review ongoing. Much PBA drunk. Matters ever more concerning ... as anyone who has read this piece by the nephew of the US Ambassador to Albia will be aware. Think I might have another little drinky to dull the potential pain. Did I mention that you're my best friend, you are? C'mon, give us a song ... c'mon ... "Hey Huuuuuge ... don't make it bad .... take a saaad sooooooong 'n' make it beddaaaaaaaah"

Reviewing the Situation

Apologies: no update today, still reviewing situation after Friday's ill tidings. Seems to me I'm going to have to come up with some kind of spectacular story if this bureau - not to mention my employment - is to survive. All suggestions welcomed. Currently performing complex scientific study into effects of alcohol on liver of middle-aged hack. Must admit, after 48 hours of solid research, having some difficulty jotting down results.

No News Today

My loyal "Twitter" followers (Twitties? Twittites?) will be aware that I am currently wrestling with three somewhat disturbing events: first, what appear to be threats of extreme violence or, at the least, extended instruction in the locations of the more sensitive portions of my anatomy at the hands of relatives of US Ambassador to Albia Janush Pazman(1), for whom I worked briefly and for whose mysterious absence I am apparently (and wholly unfairly) being blamed. Secondly, there is the alleged appearance of a wormhole(2) in central Blizsta, which is being given by one parliamentarian as the reason for his claiming a billion pahnds under his allowance for "repairs to the space-time continuum"(3). Lastly, and perhaps most disturbingly of all, there is the letter from my employer back in Britain, the international news organisation UKBINS, with whom my most loyal readers will be aware I have had some conflict in the past(4). Suffice it to say that this letter makes considerable mention of "recession", "cost-cutting" and "down-sizing", not to mention closures of certain of its less profitable foreign bureaus.

In the circumstances, I hope my readers will forgive the lack of a more detailed update today - I have much to ponder ... preferably with a glass or thirty-seven of potato-based alcohol in hand.

(1) some of whose dealings in the building, waste removal and allied trades are mentioned in earlier posts here, here, here and here.
(2) of the "hole in space" nature rather than that associated with oligochaeta.
(3) Let's face it, it makes as much sense as charging thousands for a "duck island" or moat-cleaning.
(4) See the posts here.

There He Goes ...

And so it seems that at least one subplot of the ongoing Albian allowances scandal(1) has reached the end of its final act, with the announcement by speaker Bagwnd Baffuld that he is to resign as speaker (Albian: woofferantweeta) of da Zkum, the lower house of Albia's parliament.

The announcement was not without its difficulties, not least among them the fact that it occurred some 24 hours after most politicians, press and members of the public expected it ... a speed of delivery normally associated with Albia's postal service. Yet Mr Baffuld's determination not to give up power unless it were wrenched from his cold, dead hand lasted only a day ... perhaps due to the fact that, taking him at his word, assorted members of the Nyesti, Drid and Krep parties were seen slipping piano wire into their hands, stilettos into their back pockets and selecting sites around da Grevvitren suitable to act as snipers' nests.

In the end, and after a couple of hours of feverish coverage on satellite broadcaster AKlowdA News of a type one would only expect to see in the event of impending nuclear Armageddon, Mr Baffuld's statement of resignation lasted just 15 seconds, hardly enough time for a politician to file a claim for the mortgage interest on his second, third or even fourth home, let alone for the first ousting of a woofferantweeta in 300 years.

(1) for a sample of the saga's unendingnessitude see Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Bagwynd, Payback Time, Coughing (and Shuffling) Up, Perked Up, Swine Flu Fever, Kryptonite of the Long Knives, He Who Pays the Piper ... et al.

Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Bagwynd

And so high noon strikes in Albia's parliament, da Grevvitren. Today, Bagwnd Baffuld, the man who has become the centre of the hurricane(1) over BGs' allowances(2) will try to pre-empt a motion of no-confidence(3) by making a statement to Parliament. This will not be an easy task for him, both due to the ever-increasing opposition from all sides of the House and to the fact that convention will not permit him to run a slow-moving finger under the big words when he comes to read from his prepared speech.

Meanwhile, so disgusted are Albians with their rulers that opinion polls suggest they are increasingly turning to other, smaller parties such as da Grinz (Albia's tree-huggers), the purple-faced and slick-suited nationalists of the APE and the purple-faced, bull-necked and tattooed nationalists and racists of the Albian National Party(4). In contrast to the mainstream of politics, the latter two parties are, between them, known for the strength of their convictions ... especially the ones for fraud (for the APE), incitement of racial hatred and actual bodily harm (for the C.U.N... actually, I think I'll just call them the nationalists).

(1) Actually, this is a dreadful metaphor. Normally one associates the centre of a hurricane with an eerie calm, whereas Mr Baffuld has huffed, puffed, wheezed and blustered enough to be considered as the site for Albia's next wind farm.
(2) for the history of the allowances scandal, see Payback Time, Coughing (and Shuffling) Up, Perked Up, Swine Flu Fever, Kryptonite of the Long Knives, He Who Pays the Piper ... et al.
(3) An unprecedented event, the last time woofferantweeta of da Grevvitren to be removed being Horz Jam Kevyn in 1695, chucked out for bringing da Grevvitren into disrepute by demanding too small a bribe to put legislation through the House.
(4) The Constityshn Ulbiansk vur Nazyonal Transvormati Sozyal in Albian - a name whose initials happily reflect the view of most Albians on the party's membership.

Payback Time

I would not normally bore my readers with tales of my journey to work(1) but today my passage into central Blizsta was impeded by vast numbers of politicians, all rushing to Albia's parliament, da Grevvitren, to return some of the dodgy perks they were happily creaming off the state until they so recently got caught decided to make a clean breast of things(2). As a result the roads into the capital's centre were crammed with furniture lorries (themselves stuffed with trouser presses, chandeliers, mock-Tudor beams and enough flat screen TVs to keep a junior staff member at Currys.digital in spot cream for life), a tanker (one BG had been asked to return his taxpayer-funded moat) and what appeared at first to be a wagon of manure, though this later turned out to be a group of politicians exhibiting the after-effects of "full and frank discussions" with their constituents.

With further revelations in the pages of Da Pijjonpost every day, feelings in the country continue to run high, with politicians now rating somewhere below Black Death or a night in the company of Nolli Edna on the popularity stakes. Yet there is still a worrying feeling that the fact of this level of outrage is yet to penetrate the thick walls of Da Grevvitren, or the apparently even thicker skull of the speaker, Bagwnd Baffuld. Things have reached a point where Mr Baffuld is surrounded by members proffering swords on which for him to fall but seems highly reluctant to do so, confident of the support of governing Krep Party politicians who, in the words of one member, would never try and throw out a working-class, former Mars-Bar-batterer from Dipfryde. This attitude is, of course, pretty typical of the Krep party, indicating as it does both an appalling tendency to patronise anyone who didn't go to university or is possessed of the wrong sort of accent and also the kind of defective moral compass that suggests Krep Party members keeping an incompetent in place because he's working class would be any better than the Nyesti Party keeping someone in post merely because he's a Hungri-educated merchant banker.


(1) though some might claim that I have never previously hesitated to bore them with anything at all.
(2) for the history of the allowances scandal, see Coughing (and Shuffling) Up, Perked Up, Swine Flu Fever, Kryptonite of the Long Knives, He Who Pays the Piper ... et al.

Coughing (and Shuffling) Up

The merry bandwagon that is Albia's allowances'n'expenses scandal(1) has now rolled on from the affairs of the governing Krep Party and moved on to the soon-to-be-ruling Nyesti Party and never-to-be-ruling Drid Party, many of whose members have had their various claims revealed in Da Pijjonpost. The Nyesti claims in particular make sorry reading, especially for party leader Bambi Nottinill. It is difficult enough to shed the party's oft-asserted (by its opponents) image as a bunch of rural squires and minor members of the aristocracy, intent on doing down the common man (especially when, like Mr Nottinill, one is an Old Hungrian and married to someone with bluer blood than a horseshoe crab) but it is virtually impossible when the members of that party have spent their time claiming allowances for repairs to their real tennis courts, man traps for the deer park and the upkeep of crack teams of ermine-stretchers and peasant-thrashers.

Nonetheless, Mr Nottinill has moved swiftly to seize such moral high-ground as remains, himself repaying the six hundred pahnds he received to cover the cost of a special crumpet holder(2) and forcing party members to pay back any sums which they should not have claimed ... though on the past performance of some members this might well amount to the whole of their salaries for the last decade or so.

As to the Drid Party's claims, these have largely confirmed the party's reputation, consisting as they do of expenses for guides to yoghurt weaving, recycled sandals (with socks attached) and subscriptions to Da Garindua.

Meanwhile, our old friend the speaker (Alb: Woofferantweeta) of Albia's lower house of Parliament (da Zkum), Bagwynd Baffuld has been sharing his own concern over the expenses scandal ... chiefly by beating up any politician foolish enough to mention that their colleagues may have been "a little bit naughty" within his sight. Albia's parliament, da Grevvitren, has a long and sometimes troubled history but in all its years I doubt it has previously witnessed the sight of its Woofferantweeta, red-faced and sweating, attempting to silence debate by inserting the Royal Mace into any member who had the temerity to question him. Mr Baffuld's actions have led some to question his suitability for his role as parliamentary figurehead, though given its members are usually seen as a bunch of incompetent time-servers happy to cash cheques for sitting on their arses all day he seems, to me at least, to be the perfect man for the job.


(1) see Perked Up, Swine Flu Fever, Kryptonite of the Long Knives, He Who Pays the Piper ... et al.
(2) understood to be a weedy but firm-buttocked member of this year's intake at Hungri.

Perked Up

So here I am, home again(1), able at last to survey the sad remnants of Albia's first contact with swine flu - those remnants being the most tragic victims of the outbreak, namely those sufferers who have been unable to conclude an exclusive newspaper deal, the A H1/N1 virus having turned out, outside Mexico at least, to be something of a damp and distinctly sub-lethal squib(2).

Yet while swine flu, or at least swine-flu-induced panic, seems to have abated in my absence, the scandal over the pay of Albia's parliamentarians seems to have surged, with daily revelations in right-leaning broadsheet Da Pijjonpost of dodgy claims being made by the country's top (and, indeed, bottom) political figures. Who knew that everything from rawlplugs for the dodgy shelf in Aunty Jin's back room to a politician's entire tax bill for the last forty years, via sanitary towels for the nanny, slaughtered rhino for the pet leopard and the cost of flying the surviving members of Da Eerwigz to one's fourth home to sing at a birthday party for little baby Schmo were all legitimate expenses? Yet - as the claimants repeatedly insist - all these claims appear to have been entirely within commons rules and - as the claimants even more fervently insist - insofaras they might seem a "little bit dodgy" to outsiders, should be put in no more serious a category than, say, the "borrowing" of an extra Post-It note or two from the company stationery cupboard.

Now, I freely confess that I wrote the first draft of this article on a sheet of notepaper headed "Property of Times Newspaper Group(4) - do not remove" and I am sure we would all concede that the odd bit of petty pilfering is often regarded as a normal perk of office life but I can imagine very few people who might ever have succeeded in swiping tens of thousands of pahnds each year without getting the sack ... or at the very least crippling back problems from lugging all those manilla envelopes, rolls of sellotape and hole punches. (By the way, should any of my readers be interested in purchasing items of vintage stationery, much of it embossed with the logo of the London Times, they should feel free to get in touch.)


(1) for details of my holiday arrangements, see Beating a Retreat.
(2) I, of course, was never worried in the least about swine flu(3).
(3) And anyone who claims to have seen me last Friday, bludgeoning a little old lady out of my path through customs, screaming "Get out of the way you stupid, bloody crone, don't you realise we're all going to die?" is, I can assure you, wholly mistaken.
(4) where I was an assistant junior sub-editor for three days in 1968.

The Albia Who's Who: Schmo Kavil

Record company A&R man, television producer and "entrepreneur"(1) Schmo Kavil is best known for being the face of Da Eck Faktor (and several other programmes which, name apart, are exactly the same). As such he is apparently hell-bent on destroying the remnants of Albian entertainment and music. His numerous television programmes squat across the schedules of ETV's many channels, displacing any hope of classic programming with parades of the borderline mentally ill, desperate to humiliate themselves and/or trot out carefully selected tales of personal misery in return for a femtosecond of fame. His even more numerous recording artists (all of them sourced from his programmes), meanwhile, seek to replace the vibrant and challenging popular music for which Albia is occasionally famed(2) with a diet of bland musical gloop, consisting largely of "timeless" standards being stripped naked and waterboarded like a Guantanamo detainee by a series of singers convinced that the way forward is baroque, gospel-lite, faux-soul twiddlings that wouldn't be good enough to grace the broken elevator of a run-down department store.

Mr Kavil's strangely immobile face, jet-black hair and plastic-looking skin have led some to speculate that he was cloned from a 1970's Action Man doll, though rumours that he has no genitalia are groundless: thanks to his programmes' inexplicable popularity he has long had the balls of each and every head of ETV in his pocket.

(1) In Albian usage the term is synonymous with "obnoxious git".
(2) As in the Alb-pop era of the 90s, the punk and new wave eras of the 70s and 80s and, of course, the Eerwigz-dominated 60s.

Da Underlyng

Airing on ABC1, Da Underlyng is a TV reality show which has taken it upon itself to illustrate in the most graphic terms exactly how Albia managed to decline from the world's leading economic power at the beginning of the 20th Century to a major centre for massive financial fraud, coffee-making, pole-dancing and very little else by the beginning of the 21st.

Each week a group of estate agents, human resources officers and other devotees of management bullshit, snake-oil sales and excessive self-love, attempt to become Da Underlyng, a minor dogsbody for Horz Elvin Proonfeyz, an embittered former seller of defective microcomputers and crackly-toned "hi-fi" equipment. To win Horz Elvyn's approval they must demonstrate the many facets of the modern Albian businessperson by vying to prove themselves utterly incompetent in basic tasks of buying, selling and manufacturing, while shouting down, manipulating and/or backstabbing their colleagues, with Horz Elvyn unfailingly rejecting any candidates who prove themselves honest, intelligent, competent or capable of uttering a sentence without promising to "give it 120 per cent".

TakesKo

TakesKo is Albia's leading supermarket. It evolved during the 1980s from a cheerful, pile 'en high, sell 'em cheap retailer into a global megacorporation, wielding power on a scale more usually associated with the possession of a nuclear arsenal and large standing military. In the process it subjugated the once-mighty Sharezbury and brushed aside challenges from all other retailers in its path.

These days every other shop on the Albian high street and in the out-town retail park is a TakesKo. Indeed, it is estimated that the chain has done the mathematically impossible and now receives one pahnd thirty-two for every pahnd spent by the Albian shopper.

Those running TakesKo often seek to assure us that it uses its vast resources(1) for good and not, as some believe, for the creation of a vast robot army bent on using its enormous bargaining power, economies of scale and heavily-trimmed overheads to crush humanity's resistance before flogging off the resources of the Earth and Moon to some passing Alpha Centaurians in a massive Buy One, Get One Free deal.

(1) which apparently include the right to erect stores anywhere in the country, even including Queen Dowdi's official residence at Bukkasveld Palace and the Prime Minister's 10 Quaffing Ztraht.

Beating a Retreat

Yesterday was a day of retreats. First and foremost came the withdrawal of Albian troops from Iraq, their mission - according to Prime Minister Bragdny Door, at least - accomplished. Having spent some time in Basra during the First Gulf War(1), I suspect that the Prime Minister's assessment of the mission will come as something of a surprise to the average Iraqi, who was hitherto unaware that Albia's goal in Iraq was to bugger up the country's infrastructure, shoot thousands of its people and replace one vile dictator with the prospect of a multitude of petty new ones.

The Prime Minister, meanwhile, was making his own rapid retreat, this time in the face of the forces arrayed against him over his plans to reform BGs' expenses and allowances(2). The PM's authority now appears to be vanishing faster than the polar ice-caps ... and leaving an equally drippy mess behind.

The last retreat is being made by yours truly. I can assure you this is nothing to do with any fear over swine flu and that my choice of residence in a hermetically-sealed, isolation unit on a remote island off Dipfryde is entirely coincidental. I will be back on the 11th(3). However, there is no need to mourn my absence: in a fit of unwonted effort, I have prepared a series of articles on aspects of Albian people and culture I have not previously had a chance to cover in detail. They will appear on Monday 4th, Wednesday 6th and Friday 8th at 9am BST ... assuming I have managed to work the intertube correctly. In the meantime, farewell ... and pass the Darth Vader facemask.

(1) complicated story, I was meant to be covering the Chelsea Flower Show at the time. I seem to recall alcohol may have been involved.
(2) see Swine Flu Fever.
(3) recalled by my sense of duty and not by the fact my credit will only run to a one-week stay at the unit, I assure you.