Nick Abbot, 24th October 2009:
The Prime Minister was confident, his party was certain, the City seemed sure and economists and the press were agreed. Britain had come out of recession and green shoots pushed up through dead brush of the down turn and covered the landscape for as far as the eye could see… And then The Centre For Inconvenient Truths, or The Office Of National Statistics as it’s known, let slip that our economy had shrunk again in the last quarter and we were still waist deep in the clag of recession. Which means that the financial wisdom of the PM, his party, the experts in the City, the nation’s economists and the press could be written on the back of a wine gum! That is if you could buy one… which, without a photo ID, you cannot.
A 15 year old boy attempted to acquire a packet of the multi-coloured sweets from his friendly local 99p store. This resulted in failure as he was patently too young to consume alcohol and it clearly hints at its presence on the packet. “They contain wine!” said the alert shop keeper. “Look. WINE Gums. It says it right there, on the label.” The lad was forced to hand back the forbidden confection and received a full refund of ninety-nine pence, which amounted to three kilograms of loose change, causing a hole in his pocket, and an unrefreshed palette. A full investigation by the store’s management put the over-zealousness down to an ‘unfortunate glitch’. Which is no way to describe a member of their staff…
The same phrase could be appended to an incident in the skies of Minneapolis this week, when a passenger jet overshot the airport by a little bit. Or 150 miles to be exact. Ground staff frantically tried to raise the alarm, Air Force jets were on standby to intercept, hijack procedures were commenced and then stood down, and then, after an hour of silence, the pilots got back in touch. “We weren’t sleeping,” they said. “We were just arguing.” Must have been a fascinating discussion to make them forget to land an air liner with 144 passengers in the back. Perhaps they were disagreeing over the return to economic prosperity? Or maybe they were drunk on Wine Gums, or smashed on Beer Nuts, or tripping on Acid Drops.
Wise words.
[Via Nick Abbot’s LBC Podcast. Links via BBC News, The Daily Mail and The Guardian]
