h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I would like to apologise to the British nation for my shameful dereliction of my public service responsibilities.

Almost thirty years has passed since I facetiously claimed for a three-month supply of bananas on my company expenses. I did so after an unpopular senior manager criticised a colleague for eating a banana on a customer’s premises, an action he deemed “completely unprofessional”. Rather than waiting for my misdemeanour to come out in the Daily Telegraph, I have decided to confess that those bananas never existed. To be honest, it would have been quite difficult to procure approximately two hundred pounds sterling worth of bananas in winter in northern Finland during the early 1980s. The receipt I offered actually related to the payment of a fine for a minor traffic offence. It was an unforgiveable accounting error, and I have not attempted to carry out a handbrake turn in a bus station anywhere in the world since that time.

I realise that my actions were rather pathetic in comparison to those of my betters, and that my fate at the hands of society will be accordingly shameful. While Members of Parliament might reasonably demand to be prominently lynched, perhaps using the lamp-posts on Westminster Bridge, I expect nothing better than being strung upside-down from a speed camera gantry on one of the more free-flowing sections of the M25. The fat that spits from my immolated remains will not be fit to grease the axles of the tumbrels that carry MPs to their glorious pyre. I do not expect the Metropolitan Police Force to show the slightest interest in my fate, quite unlike the attention they will lavish on the parliamentarians they are assigned to protect, when they herd them by the dozen into the House of Commons tea-room and mow them down with automatic weapons.

Since I am in a mood of contrition, I admit that I made a major error of judgement when I studied at an Oxford college with anglo-catholic leanings, and yet somehow failed to see the light and join New Labour. This in spite of the fact that those few who still call me a friend unfailingly point out my resemblance to John Prescott. I confess moreover that I have exposed neighbours as having worked in the financial sector, thereby recklessly inviting significant loss of life through widespread acts of arson and riot. I must face up to my implication in the daily execution of a dozen bankers on the steps outside the ruins of the Mansion House, even though this measure is generally held to have been effective in lessening the attrition of this mercilessly persecuted group.

It is my sincere hope that Britain will gradually be rehabilitated into the world community. Although life expectancy in this country isn’t quite what it was before the Revolution, I feel confident that there are Britons alive today who will witness the restoration of habeas corpus and international air travel, and who may even live to see us re-admitted to the Eurovision Song Contest.

Thank you for this insight into the current crisis, which I am following on the radio.

Yes! We have no bananas.
We have no bananas today.

The public shaming is nigh !

Nonetheless, your winter bananas could be considered as a luxury item not a necessity. You probably had more than enough means to buy your own bananas. You may even be able to claim, perhaps even honestly, that you don't like bananas that much......

Any unorthodox messing with bananas will certainly get you on the front page of the tabloids, leading to future book opportunites, talk show invitations, ......

Hopefully you will not be bunched (no pun intended.... well, OK, just a little) with the dastardly OAPs who only worked 50 years and, for example, receive 29p a week to which they are not fully entitled, or some layabout father of six earning undeclared income from a secondary, part-time job.......

The unneeded and underappreciated bananas, indeed the inexistant bananas, show the true worth of your education and standing.



I suggest you wear yellow for the TV interviews and get any ladies in the household to dress J. Baker style http://www.cmgww.com/stars/baker/about/photopages/photo34.html

Oh, Josephine.

Wow. I'll have to read that another three times to fully understand what you wrote there.

Yeah, I guess it's a little self-indulgent

I'm a bit surprised there doesn't seem to have been an American Revoution yet, what with millions starving in the Midwest (other than the '76 one that is. We heard about that. Smart, we are).

My own MP's been Telegraphed now, and the (more deserving) one next door too. Maybe we should get Scrof's pet snake to run against one of them.