Now we'll all do it my way

Simon Carr
Monday 04 January 1993 00:02 GMT
Comments

ALL RIGHT, I am now the ruler of the world, so you had better listen carefully to me or you won't know what the new rules are.

1) Every day will be the first day of spring. Every day there will be a howling easterly coming off the Urals, every day will be preceded by an X-rated weather forecast, every day will carry the memory of a hard winter and the prospect of a dismal summer, and after tomorrow the days will start getting shorter.

2) This is my ruling on international war. There will be no more international war. The league table of nations will be decided by the relative strength of their football hooligans. Japan, go and sit next to Kuwait, and Germany . . .

What are you looking at, Germany? I'm sorry? Nothing? I'm sorry, are you calling me nothing? Are you calling me nothing? Excuse me, hang about: aren't you the one who, didn't you beat my brother up? Aren't you the bloke, aren't you, that beat my brother up?

3) Anyone who enters the yellow box junction without being able to get out again will be fed to pigs.

4) Jeremy Beadle will not walk out of his front door without a crane falling on his Mercedes. Every time he comes back from the mini-mart he'll find his garden has been ploughed with salt. And his house will have been knocked down. Homeless and rootless as he travels the lonely world, every bed he gets into will have a horse's head in it. And every time he gets up in the middle of the night he'll find we've suspended his bed over Niagara Falls. And we won't be joking.

5) Anyone who admires a juvenile's clarinet playing of Abide with Me with the words: 'Move over Benny Goodman]' will have their tongue stapled to the roof of their mouth. Ditto for users of the phrases 'budding novelists', 'aspiring authors'.

The same goes for critics who talk about 'being in for a treat' at art exhibitions. Their typing fingers will be sewn together and they'll be required to wear mittens full of broken glass.

6) No more Leslie Crowther, sorry Les, you've had a good run, and thank you very much for all those Crackerjack pencils, but that is it.

7) David Mellor will be made Governor of Hong Kong.

8) Growth in China's special economic zones will be held under 18 per cent a year for five years to allow people to catch their breath. Their rulers, remembering the integrity and dignity with which we conducted ourselves during the Opium Wars, will apply to the Queen, asking her to adopt their country as a colony administered by Britain and paying taxes directly to its constitutional head.

9) The directors of the London Underground will be required to travel to work by London Underground. Fat, wet women will sit in their laps and burp in their faces, and mad young bank clerks will poke them with their umbrellas, and gypsies will laugh at them, and every journey will finish with neo-Nazis and Westbourne ganja gangs taking all their credit cards and tattooing their faces with the punchlines from crude knock-knock jokes.

10) Anita Brookner will be caught up in a guerrilla war fought with defective military surpluses and blowpipes; her hard-boiled novel - Airstrike] - about the experience will be made into a television mini series starring Jill St John and she will find herself at the Fox launch party, falling in love with Sylvester Stallone for the way he sings 'I Did It My Way' on a karaoke machine. The same goes for A S Byatt.

11) A novel called Oh Tickle My Bum with a Stick of Celeree] will win the Booker Prize every year, and its authors will attend the ceremony wearing only string vests and open-toed sandals and their acceptance speech will consist of vulgar noises (thurrp] phoowargghh]) made through a blubbery combination of lips and loofah-like tongues.

12) Everyone who lives in the Birmingham conurbation will be required to adopt the name Benny.

13-20) The Common Agricultural Policy will be scrapped. And if that is beyond the powers of this world's ruler it will be modified to downgrade agricultural subsidy on a progressive sliding scale so that 28 years from now the level of subsidy would have been reduced by a full 12.5 per cent in dairy and sheepmeat production but, obviously, allowing complementary set-aside substitution so that farmers would not be materially disadvantaged.

There's only so much a ruler of the world can do.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in