Murray sounds death knell for humanity

The end of the world is now more likely than not thanks to Andy Murray, British tennis ace. That was this evening's shock announcement from the Royal Society of Bibliomancers. While the rest of the country was on cloud nine, they were driving furiously towards their mountain cave bolthole, leaving nothing but this ominous press release:

"We, the Royal Society of Bibliomancers, appointed in the year 1012 to foretell of the coming of the end to the people of the land of Britain, believe that the end is nigh. We know you will probably not regard this press release with the seriousness they would have in the eleventh century but if anything that supports our claim. This is the first time in a thousand years the Bibliomancers have had a press release to make. We don't shit about, this is it.

Borne out of the studying of ancient mystical lore and an application of lost numerological equations to certain texts, the Bibliomancers have long held in their possession this prediction of the end of the world.

'Ye end finalle ande complete, shalle falle on thee lyk ane thunderclappe quhen these three thyngs shall passe: that which gives the universe masse shall be found, ane monthis rayne shalt falle in a day, ane Briton shalt wyn Wimbledon.'

It seems fairly black and white to us, you couldn't make this stuff up. The moment of eschatological verification is upon us. You have to admit it makes sense. It's been a portentous week to say the least. Interestingly, the ancient Bibliomancers also uncovered that the dinosaurs extinction was similarly presaged. A dinosaur from the ancient supercontinet of Gondwana won Wimbledon for the first time since the beginning of time. Two days later a giant meteorite, some say shaped as a tennis ball, landed.

Your call really, but we're off to the hills."

After the linguists accuracy earlier in the week over the God particle debate, it seems unwise to ignore the Bibliomancers at the end of it.

Conservatives Bring Back Billy Bunter Britain

Michael Gove today announced an inquiry into the state of school meals, or as he likes to call them 'tuck'. It forms part of the Conservative government's manifesto pledge to 'bring back the language of Billy Bunter Britain'.

The Conservatives have long held that the major problem with Britain was that people no longer say 'rotter', 'blimey', 'not on' and the like. Their plan to rectify this has been in place for years and is surprisingly subtle. Rather than using the language themselves, and being accused of elitism, they would set about establishing personae that warranted no other language to describe them.

Before their general election victory the talisman of this drive was obviously Boris Johnson. Using the public platform of London mayor he acted as a man who could only be described using some almost defunct words from the heyday of the English chaps. He was at one moment a 'blabbering idiot', at the next a 'nincompoop', a 'berk on a bicycle', then a 'mumbling buffoon' and 'complete and utter shambles'.

Since gaining power the momentum behind this subliminal vocabulary shift has increased. David Cameron has done his best to act a 'toff' on all occasions, marking himself out also as a 'sniveling creep' with his texts to Rebecca Brookes. He has made his cabinet ministers act as warped versions of prep school 'fags'. In the original version, a senior boy's 'fag' would notoriously often have to go and sit on and the (then outdoors) lavatory seats until they were warm enough for his genteel buttocks. Cameron's take on this has been to turn his cabinet ministers into reverse 'fags', making them sit in all the political hot seats, only stepping in himself once things have cooled down. However, Cameron has sadly strayed too far into the line of also being aptly described as an 'all round douchebag' and a 'bit of a cunt' for his efforts to be deemed a complete success.

The most valuable contribution to the cause has come from Michael Gove. Not important enough to be called a cunt yet not worthy of being called anything much else in common parlance, he has forced people to turn to old school, prep school, vocabulary. His face screams, 'I am a twerp', his voice proclaims proudly 'I'm a wally'. When he ordered up thousands of Bibles for schools then was scolded by Cameron for wasting public money and forced to leave them in a warehouse in India, the only word for it was 'fanny'. He consistently epitomizes the phrase 'sticking your oar in'. Today's otherwise inexplicable gesture of focusing on school dinners amongst all else that is wrong with the country can only be a valiant attempt to get the word 'tuck' back in the public discourse. We take our hats off to you Michael, you are a true linguistic revivalist and a complete and utter 'tucker'.

Stonehenge launches fashion week

Every fashion reporter knows that only one thing is certain in their fast paced world: fashions return. This summer it's the turn of the druids to show us how it's done with the launch of the first ever Stonehenge Fashion Week. Left out in the cold for over a millenium, these men from the dark ages have given us a timely reminder that a flowing beard and a bleeding ram's skull can still give real summer chic to any costume.

Innovative from the start, the Stonehenge Fashion Week dispensed with the catwalk format and heroine cheeked models. Instead Britain's remaining druids displayed their summer wardrobes in a gorsedd ceremony [traditional ceremony of bards and druids held before a festival (see photo above)].

What stood out were the bold, vibrant tones and simple use of fabrics. One gnarled old man wore a particularly fetching tartan brat [short skirt or kilt] that wonderfully complemented his frostbitten blue feet. A noticeable trend was the lighthearted use of sheep shit stains and minor fabric burns from sitting too close to fires. Leine [long shirts] with multi-coloured bars were also prominent while the stereotypical white flowing robe was largely ignored.

Perhaps the highlight of the week was the impressive closing feast. Bulls hide was everywhere to be seen and longswords were also definitely 'in'. If you don't own one already, you're going to need to soon and it's only a matter of time before they appear on the high street. Regal red cloaks abounded, as did tantalizing ensembles of feathered headdresses and six-coloured cloaks. The long curved 'horn of plenty' presented to the best dressed bard of the week made a fantastic accessory, something a little different on the beach from the usual flip flops and aviators.

Shamanistic is going to be hot this summer. If you want to know how to pull it off there's no one better to advise you than Finn McCool "Clothes", whose collection was one of the best in show. 'You should choose you vestments to suit the spirit and nature of your actions. Green blends into nature, red is the colour of blood and sacrifice, the Sun is gold and the Moon is Silver. Ask yourself whether you're going to be focusing on nature or on blood sacrifices that day and dress accordingly.'

God 'particle' discovered at CERN

Scientists at CERN announced today that they had found the Higgs-Boson particle, otherwise known as the 'God particle'. The discovery heralds a major breakthrough in particle physics. It proves another part of the Standard Model to be correct and lays bare, forever, another of the universes deepest secrets. Yet when they found it, the Higgs-Boson was not quite what they had been expecting.

'We were looking for a scatter pattern of subatomic matter that would prove the presence of the Higgs-Boson, we didn't expect to detect the actually particle itself since we had believed that would be impossible.' Said Dorky Pimplekopf, one of the team leaders at CERN. 'So none of us could quite believe it when we saw, or rather heard, the Higgs-Boson itself. It was a very small voice saying '-ness'. It turns out that we were looking for the wrong type of 'particle' all along. What actually underlies and gives weight to all matter is a very small, a subatomic, grammatical particle of the English language: '-ness'.'

When asked what the voice, presumably that of God's written into the very being of the universe, sounded like Dorky answered, 'It's hard to explain. You must understand that our microphones are incredibly sensitive and it is a sound quieter that anything any man, or creature, could ever hear. It was not a man's voice, or a woman's, or a child's. The only thing it reminded me of was when I was a boy and was playing one day at trying to reverse the Schrondinger equation. I had found a small black box and had rammed it down my pet cat's throat, in the hope the box would come out yellow. The sound the cat made as it died was reminiscent of the voice of God I heard today.'

For centuries' the scientific explanation of the world has been moving further away from normal language into the realm of pure mathematics. Now they found themselves confronted with a word, or a piece of a word. The irony has not been lost on linguists around the world. The world Dictionary Editors Union released a statement saying they were not surprised these arrogant scientific bastards had wasted billions of pounds to discover something they had known for years, 'that the answers to life's great problems lie in language and not at the bottom of a Swiss pit.'

Early speculation as to what the discovery means have been rife. With the scientists baffled by a finding that does not compute, interpretation has been sought from linguists. They suggest that it makes a lot of sense that the particle '-ness' would give ultimate mass to all existence. After all, when it is affixed to a word it gives you the essence of that word. The essence of good is goodness and by extension the essence of table might be seen as 'tableness' and life as 'lifeness'.

The linguists have suggested that the next step to understanding the universe, now the God particle has been found, is to work out what the 'God inflection' is. Then we could finally solve the problem of time and relativity by working out whether the universe exists in the past, present, future or, as many suspect, some awful sort of past-continuous.

Doing odd jobs

It's a hard life finding a job, keeping a job, enjoying a job. Just like most things, it was probably better in medieval England when a Knight was born a Knight and a starving, plague ridden peasant was born just that. At least you didn't have to worry about someone telling you you were getting the sack from being a starving, plague ridden peasant. If this strikes a chord with you, then you may be interested in some of the jobs currently on offer in 'The Medieval Job Centre'.

The Medieval Job Centre is another one of David Cameron's ways of trying to rekindle the great things that made Britain so great. Queues of jobseekers line up to be given the chance of applying for a range of medieval jobs the government has created. This, the government argues, is really job creation as they are bringing back core jobs to British industry. Jobs that have been lost for hundreds of years, signalling the nation's decline.

You can be a siffleur or professional whistler. In Merrie England professional whistlers would be employed by the wealthy to perform much the same role as an iPod dock does today. They would lie by the side of their employers bed and whistle some of the biggest hits of the day, whilst the rich man fucked, fell asleep, farted or woke up.

If siffleurring doesn't take your fancy then how about being a whiffler? A whiffler was someone who cleared the path infront of a wealthy important person so they didn't have to stand in too much muck. Or a plumist? Someone who makes plumes. This job title is as vague now as it was then. How do you make a plume?

After much consideration, I applied to be a deipnosophist; a master of the art of dinner table smalltalk. My application was refused however on the grounds that this job only really came into existence with the Empire. So instead I've landed the post of Assistant Vraicker, or seaweed gatherer. It's a word from Jersey. Apparently, vraickers only recently stopped working in Jersey. The Conservatives have drawn great heart from this, in Jersey is only a step away from reverting to a medieval feudal existence, surely the rest of the country can learn to do so too.

Heading down the information superhighway

Back when the net was young it went by the name of the 'information superhighway'. It was a road in cyberspace you got to by unplugging your phone and waiting for two minutes every time you went to a new web page. It's somewhere you went to surf and hang out in chatrooms. Not work. It wasn't so functional and damn slick as it is now. You'd still see <text>inline tags that hadn't been closed properly.<text>
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But the name 'information superhighway' is pretty much obsolete now, just as the internet it described is all but gone. It's suffered the same fate as Route 66 did at the hands of the great Interstates. An ever increasing volume of traffic is shooting across the lanes of web 2.0. Yet everyone is in such a hurry to get their information they've all but forgotten about the poor old 'information superhighway' that lies, abandoned, right alongside their slick html5 pages.Sand blows through its old watering holes. You can hang out in the chatrooms for days and not meet a soul.

What words that are now so on trend will be next pass from the language? A lot of people have bet a lot of money that we'll keep saying 'facebook me' for the next hundred years. If they'd had a proper thing about how internet terminology comes and goes, and the period in the internet's history it stands for along with it, they probably shouldn't have.

How to become the next Queen

After this weekend's jubilee celebrations a lot of people have decided that being Queen (or King) is something they would be interested in. With the Queen now approaching the age when she will be retired by Death, Buckingham Palace has announced that they will begin the process of choosing a successor. Obviously, being closely related to the current Queen will look good on your cv. But remember that as British citizens we are all somewhere in line for the throne and that Princes Charles, William and Harry have proved themselves to be unemployable muppets, leaving the field wide open.

Having prior experience at being head of state or extremely rich will be an advantage. Both President Obama and Roman Abromavich are known to be interested and will make strong candidates for the role. What will be key to their, and potentially your, success is how they interview. The Palace will be looking for someone who can talk the talk: i.e. super posh. So to help you out with your bid to rule Brittania, here are some language tips.

1. Use 'one' and the royal 'we' sparingly. A common mistake common people make is to think that the Queen uses these all the time. Not so. They are best saved for special occasions or for moments when you really need to put some little oik in their place.
2. 'Jolly' should be used instead of 'good', 'spiffing' instead of excellent, and 'really top hole' for anything stronger.
3. When you walk into the interview go up to everyone in turn, let them shake your hand and then say 'How good of you to come, what do you do?'
4. 'Bounder', 'rotter', and 'absolute shower' should be used to describe people you dislike. 'Poppycock', 'balderdash', 'absolute rot' should be used to describe anything you dislike.
5. 'What?' should be appended to every opinion you offer.
6. At the end of the interview say 'Pip, pip, old bean.' or 'toodle-pip old man'.

Make sure you stick to these tips and you'll be in with a shout at the job.

All applications should be sent by post to Buckingham Palace, with a covering letter explaining why you think you are the rightful heir to the throne.

Good luck!