Whilst the car industry waits for the government to decide on a German-style ‘scrappage scheme’ for cars there was good news for Britain’s beleaguered sapling planting businesses this week as ministers announced a new Sawage Programme for old trees. Under the new initiative, anyone with a tree over nine years old will be able to claim £2000 towards the cost of a new sapling if they cut down their old tree, chop it into little pieces and then burn it.
‘This will be a great boost to the tree growers of Britain,’ said David Short-Termism, the minister responsible for introducing the new scheme. ‘As the current economic crisis worsened, this vital industry reacted as best it could by continuing to plant acres and acres of saplings. Unfortunately, demand for these trees has slowed dramatically and now is the time for the government to use your taxes to offset their ineptitude.’
Mr Short-Termism also believes that encouraging people to destroy older, more interesting trees will have a valuable environmental effect and denies that old oaks, horse chestnuts, elms and so on can actually be better for the environment; ‘Old trees are often very dirty with moss and have squirrels living in them. By chopping down such trees and replacing them with a clean new sapling there will be a marked reduction in such factors as the amount of leaves dropped in Autumn and some other tissue thin reasons I haven’t thought of yet’.
The new scheme has been greeted with delight by major tree growers and by the bodies that represent them including the Society of Tree Growers & Planters. ‘This is exactly the sort of flimsy quick fix our industry needs,’ said STGP spokesman Mhike Dhesperation. ‘A brief period of slightly increased tree buying activity will certainly see us through the recession. Assuming of course that the recession only lasts a couple of months and then everyone who’s already chopped down an old tree and bought a new one decides they want to buy another new one. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen isn’t it? Erm…’
* Not in the Frank Carson sense of the phrase
The trend for micro-blogging came to the car industry this week with news of an exciting website that will allow major manufacturers to provide instant updates on exactly how badly they’re doing. Called Shitter, the new site has already taken off in a big way and, as one company executive revealed, it’s proving a good method for getting one up on the competition: ‘With no money to develop new models, we’ve been left with a shit load of time on our hands, which is where Shitter comes in,’ he admitted. ‘Forget quarterly sales figures, we’re updating our profile on Shitter every five minutes with reams of information that’s easily more pointless than any other manufacturer.’
For reasons that now escape us, but which almost certainly seemed like a good idea at the time, Sniff Petrol has become all modern and set up a Twitter account. So, if you’re an enthusiastic adopter of inexplicable current trends and you want a steady stream of basically utter drivel from this website (in 140 characters or less) then why not become a ‘follower’ of Sniff on Twitter.
The insistent urgency of the alarm shatters my shallow sleep like so many rocks thrown through the window of a fresh morning. Yet in truth my sleep’s fitful unrest has given me precious little perchance to dream. After all, how could I truly take a business class return to the Land of Nod when I knew what was awaiting as soon as the sun made its sneaky creep over the horizon’s lazy threshold. Clothes are thrown on with a careless speed that would make Gok Wan gasp. A breakfast is ingested with a vainglorious velocity that would cause a wolf blush. All functional actions seem to happen at the breathless and breakneck of a Buster Keaton DVD jammed on four times fast forward. At last I leave the house with the urgency of a diarrhea wracked cheetah and there in front of me is the reason for all this early a.m. hurrying and harrying: a perfect shape draped in ravishing red paintwork sits four square on the driveway. Oasis said Dig Out Your Soul. No need for digging Noel, my Soul is right here before me.
