Social (adj.): Friendly relations with others.

THE good thing about deckchairs is that they are infinitely rearrangeable.

That's presumably why, when we're in the middle of the greatest global financial crisis for a century, the government is worrying about people keeping their front gardens tidy.

Just as PM Dishface is drawing some serious criticism for spending too much time playing Fruit Ninja and not enough fixing the mess he says someone else made, loyal henchwoman and Home Secretary Theresa May has piped up about a plan she first suggested a year ago.

She wants to scrap Anti-Social Behaviour Orders and replace them with Criminal Behaviour Orders which are pretty much exactly the same, apart from the ways in which they are worse.

Among the possible uses would be criminalising people whose front gardens are a mess, noisy neighbours, takeaways, dog owners whose pets foul a communal area, and so on. Presumably young irks who cause trouble will collect them in the same way they collected ASBOs, with a shrug.

The proposals also include the power of civil injunction to 'prevent crime'. It requires zero proof of a criminal act, merely the likelihood that such an act might, at some point, be committed.

So if someone looks like they might be the sort to dump a mattress in their front garden, or that their dog may have fouled a communal area, we can injunct them.

Injunctions are those things rich people get, right? Against poor people? Usually?

So if you've got a problem neighbour - I've got one who talks too loudly and has too many parties, for example, and owns a mastiff called DeNiro - and enough of you complain about it, under the rules the police will have to investigate. If there's no actual crime then without too much fuss you can injunct them, because people who don't give a toss about their neighbours to start with are always nicer to them if they feel the crushing might of the law.

Theresa calls this being 'flexible'; I call it Orwell with a net curtain.

It may be national micro-management at its most ridiculous and potentially damaging, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't have a certain attraction. Anti-social people are everywhere, doing things which are damaging our society but for some reason aren't quite crimes, and there are plenty of things I'd like to change.

And if a few of us act together there's no reason we can't turn these CRIMBOs to our advantage...

* Injunct Dishface to clean up the mess he swears someone else made.

* Stop Simon Cowell. Just all of it.

* Any attempt to type the words 'Justin Bieber' on the internet to result in a mild electric shock.

* Get Tony Blair to take that long-awaited trip to the war crimes tribunal at The Hague, with some depleted-uranium munitions and a couple of deformed Marsh Arab babies for company.

* Dominique Strauss Kahn can be criminalised as a sex-pig without the rigmarole of a rape trial we all know he'll probably pay to get out of anyway.

* Low-level thuggish behaviour would merit a stay in the stocks with rotten tomatoes being chucked at you from dusk til dawn. Joey Barton, this means you.

* People spitting in the street would be cuffed immediately and thrown into the darkest sewer of Belmarsh nick, never to be heard from again.

* Ditto people who put their feet on the seats of buses and trains. WOULD YOU DO THAT IN MY HOUSE? SHIFT THEM, SUNSHINE.

* A policeman would take names and then calmly and simply explain the rules of escalators and pavements to tourists. They would be deported after a second infraction.

* Gideon Osborne to be forced to live on benefits in Toxteth for a year. That's 'all in it together'.

* People who talk to others on the internet in a manner they would not in the street to have 'DIE SCUM HA HA DIE I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE' shouted at them randomly for a week.

* Samantha Brick to be sat down in a calming environment and spoken to by counsellors with her best interests at heart.

* The practice of texting in place of conversation to be outlawed after three instances of imparting major news this way. Birthday wishes, pregnancy news, cries for help etc would lead to your text service being switched off in order to force meaningful interaction.

* Irks who play music on their mobile phones too loudly on public transport to have phone smashed with a hammer in front of them.

* Anyone who goes out in public without using deodorant to be hosed.

* Geri Halliwell will be stopped from telling other people that they cannot sing. If she persists, the sound of a cat trapped in a tin dustbin will be played at her until she ceases.

* Posh boys smashing up restaurants for larks will be penalised by being made responsible for everything. Oh hang on...

The best thing to do, of course, is for everyone to try to be more neighbourly. For me to scratch DeNiro's ears, for my neighbour to turn the music down, to ask people politely not to spit and move their feet, to remember how to apologise and rub along more nicely.

To be more social, generally. And if someone can't do that to the extent that people are harmed then there are plenty of laws already around to deal with it.

Because it's the fact we're not being sociable ourselves which is the reason why some of those problems start, and why the government wants to smack us all around with a heavy hand in the hope that we'll be so busy trying to get them to hit someone else we'll stop wondering what they're playing at.

Which, if Theresa is right, is exactly the same crap they were doing a year ago.

If only they weren't such lemons.

Poli-tics; Greek, meaning 'many leeches'.

FOR reasons only an idiot savant could fathom, everything depends upon Greece.

Your mortgage. Your chances of being made redundant. Your local school and hospital. The police on your streets and the nurses who will tend you when you're ill.

How is that even possible? Greece is miles away and the single currency has nothing to do with us. Well, here's an idiot to explain...

"The eurozone crisis is very serious and it is having a real impact on economic growth across the continent, including in Britain," said Chancellor Gideon this week.

"It is the uncertainty that is causing the damage. Of course countries have got to make difficult decisions about their public finances, we know that in Britain.

"But it's the open speculation from some members in the eurozone about the future of some countries in the eurozone which I think is doing real damage across the whole European economy."

Any the wiser? No, not really, and nor is Gideon I suspect. Sounds a lot like everyone's having a panic which in turn is causing a panic.

So this is what's really happened.

Back in the 1960s some bright spark came up with the idea that a united Europe wouldn't have another war. We didn't enjoy the last two, it was all very expensive, and let's not do it again.

Over the decades that followed various politicians became more and more certain that having a whole new parliament with more politicians would be a great idea, and Europe would be like the USA, but with better cheese.

In 1992 lots of European governments signed the Maastricht Treaty which set out how some of that union was going to take place, and in 1999 the single currency was set up. Greece joined in 2001 and a year later the first coins and notes were in circulation. It created a single trading market which made it easier - and cheaper - for business to operate.

Today the Euro is the currency of 332million people in 17 countries. It's the second-most traded currency on the planet, after the dollar, and there are 150m people in Africa who use currencies which are pegged to the Euro.

A lot, it must be said, depends upon it.

The problem is that despite having a 50-year run-up the whole idea is massively flawed. Europe is not the USA - it's got lots of governments, not one. It has lots of laws, languages and cultures. And it has many different economic mannerisms as a result.

The main mannerism, if you're Greek or pay any attention to history, is that you spend more money than you make.

The first recorded Greek debt default was in the 4th century BC. Thirteen Greek city states borrowed money from a temple and never paid it back. The temple took an 80 per cent loss, and no-one learned their lesson.

More recently Greek defaulted on its debts in 1826, 1843, 1860, 1894 and 1932. In fact for 50 per cent of the time it's been an independent nation, it's been broke.

At the moment Greece loses around €15bn every year in tax, and while trying to crack down on tax evasion it has shut 130 tax offices and made their staff redundant. It's got only five million people in its work force, and a 40 per cent rate of tax dodging.

So of course, it was a sound idea to bail it out twice in the past two years with a grand total of €320bn.

Again, not our problem right? Except Britain 'owns' about £14.6bn of that debt, thanks to private banks and government lending to the International Monetary Fund. France and Germany own far more, the Americans and Japanese a bit less, but we all have a chunk of it and as has often been remarked we don't have any money left.

That money we don't have has been loaned to Greece which is using it to repay us for the loans it took out earlier and already can't afford to pay.

If we lose the money we've promised to Greece, we have less to spend on nurses. And the chances of our losing that gamble are pretty close to 100 per cent, as every City trader knows. Those guys know how to make money and can make as much of it from a bust as they can from a boom. They're just waiting to pounce.

The best thing in Greece's favour at the moment is that it has no actual government.

The Euro was a politician's idea. Lending money to Greece despite it being a blatantly silly move was a politician's idea. And politicians, generally speaking, can afford to pay for their own nurses.

Which is why they cannot, will not, admit that the Euro is as doomed as a sickly baby gazelle in the middle of the Serengeti surrounded by particularly peckish lions.

The website of the European Union, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, still claims that the Euro "makes very good economic and political sense". It claims the single currency "encourages sound public finances", even though it's made cock-all difference to the Greeks.

This is my favourite bit: "The size and strength of the Euro area also better protect it from external economic shocks, such as unexpected oil price rises or turbulence in the currency markets."

Politicians, eh? Don't you just love 'em? Bless.

They finish by saying we should all be very proud of the Euro because it "gives the EU’s citizens a tangible symbol of their European identity, of which they can be increasingly proud".

It's been more than 10 years and Europe is no more like the USA than it was before.

There was a major war which killed tens of thousands of Europeans after the union was formed, so it's not helped much with that.

And our European identity, just at the moment, is that we're being run by a bunch of idiots who don't read, don't listen, and can't count.

Unfortunately, they still suck.

'A good decision is based on knowledge, not on numbers.'

- Plato

Show me the money.

THERE are lots of things I've learned from being a journalist.

How surprisingly useless the people in charge of things can be, for one. The fact there is no such thing as perfect, for another, and that a cup of tea will make the worst things in the world slightly more bearable.

But the greatest truism has to be that people will always blame other people for things that are wrong rather than resolve the factors which actually caused it.

So racism is the fault of racists, rather than bad education or social segregation. Debts are the fault of over-spending as opposed to normal spending which, when the bottom falls out of the financial world, suddenly isn't a good idea. Traffic jams are blamed on everyone else driving, rather than the person doing the blaming who is also sitting in the queue.

And when you run out of money it's because people aren't giving you enough.

People who sneak and lie and dodge and fiddle, who hide money, dive through loopholes, and viciously give their cash to charities rather than the taxman. Running out of money is certainly not the fault of the taxman spending it on the wrong fighter jets, redundancy pay for nurses and benefit errors which cost us four times as much as fraud.

The only way of resolving the issue is therefore forcing people to pay more. Hike taxes, close loopholes, catch the nasty multi-millionaires who must have millions purely because they've never paid anyone anything.

Of course such people exist. Billionaire Sir Philip Green for example, who bizarrely was made a knight of the realm while giving his massive business to his wife who is domiciled abroad for tax purposes. The people who sleep on private jets in order not to be in the UK for more than 90 nights a year, or the ones who live in homes owned by relatives or a family trust, like Iain Duncan Smith and Jonathan Djanogly.

But according to the latest figures from the Treasury, there's not very many of them.

There are 12.

Yes, 12 people earning more than £10m and paying less than 10 per cent tax. Out of a possible 200. Another 26 paid between 10 and 30 per cent and the vast majority pay what they ought.

Last year there were 10,000 people who earned between £1m and £5m, and around 1 in 10 of them had a bit of a fiddle - not because they dodged income tax but because their money wasn't income in the normal sense. It came from dividends and capital gains, which Gideon has decided to tax at a lower rate. And it also means that 90 per cent paid what we'd expect them to.

Ninety per cent of people behaving well seems like a pretty good rate to me. It also seems about average for any situation in life - for a classroom, a hospital ward, an open-plan office. Ninety per cent of people getting their head down and cracking on is pretty normal, and pretty okay.

That is people acting like people do. And you're not going to change that.

It's not worth changing laws, leading witch hunts and making an example for the sake of that minority, because doing so just sweeps up the rest as well.

If you want to stop millionaires in listed buildings putting in swimming pools without VAT, you'll end up taxing churches putting in disabled ramps and little old ladies in leaky thatched cottages.

And if you want to stop tax relief on charitable donations you'll have to get round the fact it was given in the first place in order to help charities, and taking it away will catch a handful of wrong-un's but mainly just piss all over the people who can least afford it.

I'm getting a little annoyed with a Chancellor who blames other people rather than fixing things. I'm tired of the vast majority paying more while getting less, and the constant media briefings about how it's all a bad man's fault rather than coming up with any bright ideas about how to get that 90 per cent working better and being richer, while keeping as much of an eye as you can on the remaining tenth.

But then, Gideon's last financial qualification was a Maths 'O' level. Although we don't even know if he got that, or if he did at what grade, because he's very conspicuously not told anyone.

My last financial qualification was a B in my Maths GCSE, and while I'd hesitate to lecture the Treasury on long division I do feel able to tell Gideon a thing or two about people.

Stop going after the little man, the middle man and even the big man. It's a massive waste of time and money because they either have no cash, not very much cash, or so much cash they can afford to employ better accountants than you. The bad ones are going to carry on being bad whether you like it or not.

Go after the money, instead. Go after Vodafone, Apple, Google, eBay, Yahoo! and Amazon which earn billions in this country but route it all through Ireland, Holland and Luxembourg.

Chase the Royal Bank of Scotland whose employees are being investigated for criminal tax fraud, Barclays which owes you £500m and Goldman Sachs which owes you £10m interest on its last bill.

You don't need to penalise them out of existence. You don't need to worry they'll all clear off if you expect them to pay normal corporation tax at 25 per cent, a rate most of us would be thrilled with.

They'll stay because there are 62 million people in this country who, if you'd just stop screwing them for five minutes, have money to spend.

Alternatively, carry on as you are and see where it gets you come the next election.

Although if you can do the maths on that I'll be very surprised.

"So 45.8m voters, 90 per cent of them hate me, that's... MILLIONS OF VOTES! Hooray!"

Welcome to my world.

BEING a journalist isn't all champagne and parties, you know.

More often than not you're sat in a stinky car filing copy on a laptop with barely any battery left in the rainy car park of a service station in the arse end of nowhere, because it's the first place you could find with a phone signal.

You've more than likely got out of bed at the crack of sparrow's fart to drive there, only to be told something you don't want to hear but have to turn into a page lead anyway, and already been bollocked twice for not having got there sooner, filed your copy yet or ringing the newsdesk when The Editor was talking to them.

Tired, depressed, under-appreciated, you file your copy, sigh, and then wander into the service station for a pee and something warm. Not too expensive, mind, because the days of claiming subsistence expenses while on the road are long gone.

And there, in a cabinet under some hot lights, shines the golden crust of a pasty.

You could queue up for some anorexic fries and a flaccid burger at the fast food franchise, but the act of engaging your mouth with either would only depress you more. You could try one of the stale tuna sandwiches sweating in a plastic wrapper, but it won't bring you any joy.

You want the pasty. Beef steak, potato, swede and onion - no carrot, carrot is wrong - all wrapped in a handy and tasty pastry container. It is the foodstuff of the working class, the food which since medieval times has powered industry and provided the humble employee the same sustenance it gave to royalty. It is better than a bridie, less messy than an empanada, more solid than a roti.

It sits there, glowing before you. Your fingers fumble for your money but, as usual, you've not much in your pockets. There are some bits of fluff, a business card for someone you can't remember, a paperclip bent out of shape to try to fix your mobile phone, and precisely £2.50 in coins.

'Thank God,' you think. 'That's how much a pasty costs.'

You fish it out from under the lights with a pair of tongs - you feel quite grown-up for being allowed to use the tongs in a shop - slide it into a bag, and nestle the warm package in your hand as you approach the till.

And there your dreams are dashed, as a hatchet-faced service station operative informs you 'at's free quid.'

You stutter. There must be a mistake. Pasties are cheap, affordable foodstuffs for the working classes, you protest. 'Free quid,' she insists. 'Wen' up inna budget, innit.'

There is no ATM in this godforsaken spot. No money in your other pockets, at the bottom of your bag or on the floor of your car, even though you hunt under the drifts of newspapers and crap with which it is covered. Disconsolately you return the glorious meal-in-a-pastry-coat to its spot under the lights, where someone wealthier may see it, buy yourself a poxy tuna sandwich for £2.45 and trail sadly back to your car.

You look at the sandwich. It droops. You sigh.

And the world, already quite shitty in so many major and far more important ways, gets a little bit shittier, just for you.

Thanks, Gideon.

Good news for some.

A FREELANCE friend told me last week about trying to sell a story to a national newspaper. "I rang them up," he said, "and it was like talking to someone who'd just been in a car accident."

On the one hand, journos will always complain newsdesks aren't treating their stories with the Watergate-shattering respect they deserve. And on the other he had a point. The combination of phone-hacking and corruption scandals, a public inquiry and three police investigations are having a serious effect on even those of us who are not under suspicion.

If you open a national newspaper today, you'll have to look hard to find a story that hasn't come from a press office, showbiz agent or what's known as a 'buy-up' - when someone comes to us for a full sit-down chat and a cheque.

Today The Scum splashed on a buy-up with the mum of a £45m lottery winner. The Daily Glimmer went with a story from the wires about a baby killed in an American tornado, the Wail with information from an FOI request, The Groaner's done Russia, The Tims did the opinion of a Falklands War vet and the Wellygraph led with a behind-the-scenes briefing from our beloved Chancellor Gideon.

They're are all perfectly reasonable stories, got in perfectly reasonable ways. On a Monday papers have less news in than the rest of the week because they were prepared on Sunday when there's very little going on, and without the Screws (RIP) setting the agenda there's less material for the dailies to mop up. But I've sat and read all of today's papers and I can't for the life of me see a story about crime, politics or health that hasn't been officially approved in some respect.

Critics will say this just goes to show that all such yarns were got via criminal means, and now the guilty parties are so scared of being caught they've cleaned up their act. But a more realistic person will wonder whether all newspapers would have had the budgets to pay a bung or hack a phone on every story, never mind the inclination. In my experience the vast majority of tales come from somebody telling someone else something for free, as a bit of gossip, sometimes with and sometimes without realising that information would be passed on to a journalist.

I've known celebrities who tell their friends things on the clear understanding it will end up in print, and I've known stories which came about because someone sat and gossipped to their hairdresser, who in turn repeated it to the next client who just happened to be the wife of a journo having her roots done. Coppers I've dealt with over the years generally tell you stuff for free, for exactly the same reasons that celebrities, politicians and showbiz PRs do - because it makes someone look good. A good journo takes such briefings with a pinch of salt, but listens to them all the same. Vanity works harder than money does.

The scrutiny the Press is under is fair enough. Criminals need to be investigated and held to account, whatever business they're in. But the timing of an inquiry being held before the criminal cases which sparked it, the investigations which are being dragged out over years, is leading to what can only be called a story crunch - just like an economic recession, only with a lack of public information.

Without a single criminal case being heard or conviction won, journalism has become a trade where the phone has stopped ringing. A copper on a case who thinks his superiors have screwed it up is not going to take the risk of a quiet word in a journo's ear. A soldier who has had to spend thousands of pounds buying his own kit isn't going to get his mum to ring a newspaper on his behalf. A teaching assistant, council clerk, librarian, prison officer, dustman or anyone else employed on a public wage is going to be terrified of losing their job if they flog a tip for £50 - and it's tips which are often the first step on the story ladder, which allow an investment of time and effort to build up to a really good scandal.

Do you think politicians have stopped lying? Do you believe prisoners are all being well-behaved, that celebrities have turned their backs on drugs and hookers, doctors have stopped making mistakes, or that the courts only jail the guilty and let the innocent walk free? Those stories are still happening. We just aren't hearing about it.

And if they're scared, then so are we. Hacks worry every phone call and email could be handed over to the police, that papers won't protect the sources we work hard to reassure, that so much as buying a pint for a CPS lawyer after court will see everyone involved collared by a police force under pressure to compensate for its previous mistakes. We err on the side of extreme caution rather than take a risk.

Which of course is good news for some. Particularly if you're in charge of a government overseeing controversial changes to the criminal justice and welfare systems, sacking thousands and cutting benefits. It's good news too if you are one of the top bods in the Met Police, and want to tell other people what is and is not in the public interest without letting them make up their own minds.

It's quite good if you're a publicist who can threaten cowed journalists, or a celebrity with a book or DVD to sell, and it's bloody brilliant if this time last year you were a Prime Minister facing difficult questions on how much you knew about the whole damn mess when you employed one of its central figures as your spin doctor.

And it's more marvellous still if you are a lawyer acting for one of the truly guilty individuals who not only corrupted others but became corrupt themselves, who twisted my trade and abused their position for their own gain. Because not only is there a bucketload of billable hours in this, when it finally comes to court your client will walk.

I do not want news that has been approved by a press officer, run past the police or checked against Hugh Grant's moral compass first. I want my news back - cleaned of criminality and paying off its debts but just as badly-behaved and mischievous as it ever was, kicking over the dustbins, cocking a snook and scribbling away frantically because it had a really, really good story to tell.

Maybe tomorrow?

Scrutiny stills the hand, even if it's not a guilty hand.

Double-oh George.

THERE are two ways of looking at the world - how you would like it to be, and how it really is.

As a hack I fall into the latter camp, but our beloved Chancellor of the Exchequer Gideon seems to veer to the fairytale side of things.

On the one hand there's his economic policies, which are all unicorns and dancing fairies and nice comfy toadstools for the pixies to sit on when they've finished their 36-hour shift solving all the problems of the Wicked Old Previous Administration.

And on the other there's his self-image.

Gideon is mean. Gideon is moody. Gideon, he probably tells himself in the mirror every morning, is good to go.

Gideon believes he is actually a secret agent using the alias George to fight the evil doings of SMERSH.

And after he defeats debt and unleashes a field of brightly-coloured ponies with names like Jobs, Growth and Small Business Loans he will go home to ravish his wife with a wink and a witty bon mot.

Which is a lovely fantasy for him to have, although it leaves me feeling a little unwell.

In reality his economics make him look like the fifth wheel in an international Monopoly game where he seriously believes that a dosshouse on the Old Kent Road is a worthwhile investment while he gets fiscally trounced by every other player, each of whom thinks he's an idiot.

In reality he is called Gideon, banks at Hoare & Co where you need £500,000 in readies and an invite to open a current account, is the future 18th baronet of Ballylemon and Ballintaylor, managed a 2:1 in modern history and has about as much idea of how to balance a budget as I do about tying a dickie bow.

Although he doesn't seem very good at that either.

Gideon thinks he's the man. But he doesn't realise the man in question is a puffed-up plump pillock just like Nicholas Soames, and should be banished to bark from the backbenches where he won't cause anyone much trouble and he can give us the occasional laugh, instead of being in charge from which position he's giving us bugger all to smile about.

Still, it's good to know that someone's making the most of the taxpayer-funded canapes.

 It'll shift a lot quicker if you run, mate.

A bad machine blames the programmer.

WHEN men do bad things, they usually do it to other people.

Carlos the Jackal - once the world's most wanted terrorist, the Osama bin Laden of his day - thought nothing of tossing hand grenades into packed bars, or firing rockets at a nuclear power station. He thought he was right.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn thinks nothing of seducing or attacking women, and doesn't seem to see the difference between the two methods. He also thinks he is right.

Dishface and Gideon think they were born to run the country, and that if their policies have negative effects on its people then it is the people's fault. The single mum should have got married, the pensioner should work harder, the disabled should find a cheaper wheelchair. Dishface and Gideon not only think they're right, they have been told it since they were babies.

And of course, Simon Cowell inflicts the X Factor on much of the English-speaking world.

Women, on the other hand, generally do bad things to themselves. And they always think they are wrong.

So someone trying to win a singing contest will dress like a hooker in order to persuade people to listen to her voice. Someone whose career depends on her looks will abandon them as they mature and let her face and body be cut, scarred, peeled and injected to make others happy.

Dawn French spent years telling us and herself how great it was to be morbidly obese, and now says next-to-nothing about losing half her body weight because whatever she says she will seem to have been wrong at some point.

Cheryl Tweedy, meanwhile, hasn't eaten a proper meal in years - Nando's doesn't count, love - and now announces she is under doctor's orders to fatten up, while posing for photographs that are airbrushed to make her look thin because looking normal would be wrong.

The way men and women are presented to the world by television, advertising campaigns, newspapers and magazines does not lead people to think these celebrities should be pitied. Instead, men behave like oafs because oafs are what they see, and women blame and hurt themselves for not being someone else's idea of perfect.

It can lead, in extremis, to cases like that of Rebecca Jones and her daughter Maisy. Rebecca has anorexia, is 5ft 1in tall and weighs five stone. Her condition means she does not have enough trace elements in her diet, including potassium which is vital to make the heart beat, and could have a heart attack at any time.

She encourages Maisy to eat whatever she wants, as she knows her own attitude to food is unhealthy. Unfortunately Maisy, seven, is a stone and a half overweight for her age and wears clothes for children two years older. Neither of them is healthy, although Maisy could well grow out of it.

The fact that in general men do bad things to other people and women do bad things to themselves is not new, but perhaps things might improve if we treated them more alike - if men sometimes asked for help rather than punishment, and if women could stop punishing themselves.

Yes, I know, pigs might fly. But I have lost count of the famous people I could diagnose as victims of something, and the number of times I have explained to someone that truly emulating such people would make them miserable, angry and probably hungry.

We can but dream that one day we will rise above our wiring.

Humans seen from space.

THOUSANDS of miles above Earth, on a lonely spacecraft, alien research scientist Grfelft scratches his arse as he slithers into the viewing room.

He pours a cup of coffee, stretches his tentacles, and grunts at his colleague Bob before slumping onto a chair in front of the computer screens.

"What are they up to today then?" he says in a grumpy tone. Grfelft has been on this posting for 485 years so far, and is not enjoying it much.

Bob leans back from the telescope, rubs his eye, and says: "They're all shitting themselves."

Grfelft sighs. "They're always doing that. We reported that the first day we were here, and you know The Big Wang doesn't believe us and we're not allowed to go down there to get samples. Just leave it."

Bob grabs a handful of popcorn and puts his eye back to the scope. "No, seriously. They're panicky-shitting-themselves."

Grfelft raises a legbrow. "Really? Where's Liz Jones?"

"She's in Somalia. They haven't found out about her yet, don't worry."

"So what's put the wind up them?"

"Well, as far as I can make out, there's been a critical loss of confidence leading to widespread fear about the future."

"Are you sure Liz Jones isn't involved?"

"Don't worry, she's on a low-level data-collection mission in the Horn of Africa. There's no mobile signal, she can't do much harm. No, this is all about the economy."

"Oh God, not that again. It's so BORING. That killing spree last week was much more interesting."

"Hmm. Well, anyway, there's these bankers, and they decided that America wasn't as safe as they thought it was, and they said so, and then all the bankers sold everything they had with a dollar sign on it, and that made everyone else sell everything too, just in case. Now all the bankers are worried that all the money they've given everyone won't be paid back, and they might ask the governments to pay them more money to make up for the fact they're less likely to pay it back."

"Has anyone figured out yet that none of this money exists?"

"Don't seem to, no," says Bob, chewing on a simulated bacon sandwich and fiddling with the zoom on the White House.

"So, basically, everything's exactly the same as it was yesterday?"

"Yup," says Bob.

"Christ, this place is shit. D'you remember that millennium we spent watching the triple-breasted ziggles discover sexual reproduction? That was fun. So who's in charge of all the money?"

"A French lady, but she's only been in the job five minutes and has been accused of corruption. It used to be this fat French man, but he's a sex-pig so he had to resign."

"Oh, well, the French. What'd they expect? Where are the world's leaders, then?

"Well, they're on holiday. Obama's had a birthday party, Sarkozy's on the Riviera, Merkel's in the mountains and Dishface is in an Italian villa. Gideon's at Disneyland. But all of them are really upset. They've all been ringing each other up and screaming. Gideon's been screaming even when he's not on the phone."

"But they're all still breathing in and out, right? Most of the humans are in a job and most of them have their health?"

"Yeah, pretty much. Thirty per cent of them have got the internet and Steve Jobs is richer than America. The Horn of Africa's hungry but everyone's used to that."

"Well, they'll send it some money and the soldiers will use it to buy more guns, like normal. They still haven't realised China's in charge of everything. Anything else?"

"Yeah, riots in London. Burning and stuff."

"Really? Why?"

"Some coppers shot someone so they had a protest and it turned into a riot. They looted CarpetRight and Aldi, and broke into Maccy D's and started making their own fries."

"That's the problem with looters, no ambition. What's anyone doing about it?"

"Dishface has flown his tennis coach out to Tuscany."

Bob finishes his sandwich, licking his tentacles as Grfelft repeatedly hits his head against the desk.

Grfelft sits up, and sighs. "Right. Well it can't be all bad. What's happening with the polar bears? I quite like them."

"Oh, another one got shot because it tried to eat some schoolboys who camped in its garden when it hadn't eaten for months."

"NO! THOSE BASTARDS!" Grfelft goes a purple colour, angrily stabs at his keyboard, opens the Polar Bear programme and changes some data. Bob looks nervous and tries to lighten the atmosphere.

"Umm, have you seen this great new app on my iPhone, it's called a FoxBall, and what you do is..."

"WHATEVER! I don't fucking care! These people are IDIOTS. IDIOTS! The single-celled organisms at the bottom of the methane oceans at the other end of the galaxy have more common sense. I mean, it's beautiful down there and they've got orgasms and chocolate and motorbikes but they spend all their time stressing about stupid shit and money which doesn't matter in the least and whether their bums are too big. I'VE GOT SEVEN BUMS, HOW DO YOU THINK I FEEL?"

This last sentence is shouted at the large floor-to-ceiling window in the viewing room, and is accompanied by a pint of Grfelft's facial slime which spatters across the glass in his rage. A small squeegee descends from the ceiling with a reproachful noise to wipe it off.

Grfelft subsides. "I'm going back to bed for a couple of years. Maybe when I wake up they won't be quite so bloody stupid."

He stomps off, pausing in the doorway to say over his shoulder: "And get Liz Jones in for a service. Damn thing's malfunctioning every five minutes, we'll have to give her a rebuild. The only research she's sending is about Jim Kerr."

As the electric door whizzes shut Bob rolls his eye, scratches an elbow with one of his feet, and switches over to EastEnders.

* Read updates from Bob and Grfelft here and here.

The greatest con trick in history.

BARACK Obama has wangled a last-minute deal to save the US economy and, by extension, that of the rest of the world.

Although the richest nation on Earth was going to go bust on Wednesday - unable to pay for its soldiers, civil servants, schools and countless other things - he managed to get an agreement to extend its debt in return for spending cuts.

The US debt ceiling is already at $14.3trillion, or in proper money £8,736,300,000,000. So that's a bit like me having massive negative equity on my house yet somehow convincing the bank to lend me more money in return for spending slightly less on shoes.

Obama did it because there's elections next year, and if he didn't the other side would get in. Fair enough because no-one in their right mind wants Sarah Palin in charge of plastic cutlery, much less a superpower.

Meanwhile the US government has just $73billion cash in hand, whereas computer company Apple has $76bn. But that's fine, because I already thought Steve Jobs was running the world anyway.

And here in the UK our debt is forecast to hit £1.1trillion this year. Neither Dishface and Gideon, or Miliminor and Ed Ballsitup, have any idea what to do about that.

Well, here's a clue because there is one country where the economy is booming. Growth is forecast to hit 2.3% this year, the deficit turned out to be lower than expected and inward foreign investment is up. There will have to be some spending cuts and national debt is high, but day-to-day Belgium is ticking along quite nicely thank you.

Yet for 414 days they have had no government. A coalition collapsed last April and since then the civil servants have quietly gone about their business and been quite good at it, freed from new legislation and taxes and election-winning stunts. They've chaired the presidency of the EU and helped out in the bombing of Libya and nothing's gone too wrong.

Do you remember the general election last year? No government for five days while politicians did their deals for a coalition, and actually not much governing going on for the six weeks before that because they were campaigning. There was no looting, everyone paid their taxes, and no-one much minded that the Queen was in charge of everything for the first time since 1642.

So that means it must be the politicians making a mess of everything. Who'da thunk it?

I take my hat off to them. I always thought Parliamentarians were pretty dense, mostly fat windbags of not much use. Turns out it's all a ruse and they have very cleverly persuaded us we need them - while charging us £136m a year in salaries and expenses. We even give them a subsidised bar.

It's actually sort of impressive, if by impressive you mean 'wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire'.

"The correct position of a journalist to a politician is that of a dog to a lamp-post." 

H.L. Mencken

Letters to Lillys.

TIME to catch up with the mailbag, as it's been a couple of weeks since the last round-up. And what a few weeks.

First there was a stream of resignations over the hacking scandal, which despite allegations of paying police officers has yet to become the corruption scandal which would carry far stronger penalties. This post pointed out that Dishface was the ultimate target of the story and could well be gone by Christmas.

Tom said:

"I'd say Cameron could still brazen it out, given Labour's utter complicity in all this, were it not for the fact that (a) the BBC will never, ever report this evenly, (b) he's not got any real personal support among the Tory press and (c) that he is and always has been a total c*nt."

Colin added: "First Sir Paul Stephenson. Now Yates of the Yard. By tonight, Inspector Fowler and Constable Goody from The Thin Blue Line will be running the Met."

A promise about the journalistic ethics of this blog produced a mixed response, with Freddie saying: "The British public needs to lose its obsession with gutter news."

Louise added:

"Sorry but your claim that the BBC is the only journalistic organisation that has its own code of ethics is simply not true. The Guardian's Editorial Code is published on its website and is not so hard to find. And there is, of course, also the National Union of Journalists' own Code of Conduct, which is more rigorous in many respects than the PCC's."

Ed: Having experience of the Guardian, I wish their code of conduct included 'paying people on time'. Bloody hippies.

Then there was the facepalm moment when Posh Spice designed a naff handbag with a £8,995 price tag and a handwritten note from her ladyship in it. Max said: "Ah but when we will see the FoxBag?" John added: "She is such an unfortunate event in the history of humanity." And Pyers said: "A fool and their money..."

Ed: FoxBag? Brilliant idea.

Then Amy Winehouse died, as many famous people seem to do, in time for the Sunday papers. This post about the effects of addiction on those who love an addict seemed to strike a chord.

Doodah said: "My family has been living with my brother's addictions and their effects for 20+ years. Your piece was spot on, thank you. Scotia said: "Foxy, that's a very personal and powerful piece of writing."

Gillian added: "For me you said it all, I am the daughter of an alcoholic father who died aged 52, anger is still part of my life 10yrs on." Richard said: "Thought your blog post was the best thing I've read over the past few days about Amy Winehouse and her death." Slay added: "Unfortunately, only someone who has seen it / done it can tell a tale so well. An inspired blog. A tragedy." And Pamela said: "8 years into recovery, only after 4 did i realize how selfish i had been.. great blog." Paul added: "Your piece 'Life is a losing game' has an existential weight and daylight clarity which I found arresting and refreshing. I have read it again and again. I guess that makes me a fan."

Issy was one of a handful to take exception: "Your piece on Amy is incredibly narrow-minded & naive. It's like telling someone who is suicidal to 'pull their socks up'."

Enid added:

"A lot of very creative people are emotionally fragile and unable to cope with the pressures that come with fame/notoriety. Unfortunately, Winehouse's premature death was the obvious outcome of her extreme lifestyle."

Ed: I very intentionally didn't venture into a debate on legalisation or cures - I wrote only about how it felt to be me. Whether addiction is a disease or affliction is hard to say, because it's not like a virus you just contract; you have to invite it in. Many people have stood on that threshold and said 'no' - myself included - and others, once across it, have had the strength of mind it takes to come back. I do not like romanticising addiction by saying "oh but they were too fragile to cope without" because if that were true the physically and mentally disabled would be most likely to succumb, and they're not. Addicts are generally highly intelligent but get trapped in a spiral very hard to break out of. I have a lot of sympathy for addicts but far more for the people who try to help them.

A simple explanation of economics for dummies caused David to say: "Stuff like this blog is why, despite our differences, I love you." Rachael added: "V clever piece. Now, I'm off to sign on..." John said: "I am disappointed in George, who I had always thought an astute operator. Blaming the royal wedding! Honestly, what he does he take people for?"

Then a lady let her boyfriend cover her in tattoos, causing Ray to ask: "If they split up will she spend a fortune on laser removal?" Ian added: "I consider a suntan self-mutilation." And Matthew pointed out: "Tarantulas aren't poisonous. they are venomous to other smaller spiders, their prey, but not humans."

Ed: They certainly look homicidal. Ugh.

And finally the week ended with the news that the gods of publishing had finally granted a book deal to Yours Truly. Lee said: "At last. Hoorah! It was the Fox Ball branding campaign that swang it. Clever girl." Philip said: "Splendid news, foxy. Well done, girl. Licks lips at the thought of vaguely true stories and vile encounters in the great Metropolis." Harry said: "Turns out you can get it if you really want." Olivia said: "Congratulations to @fleetstreetfox who I hear has a book deal. Thoroughly and foxily deserved. Can't wait to read it." Minx added: "Congratulations!!! Yr tweets & blogs make me pmsl & u even made me cry once. I'll buy yr book!"

Which is a nice end to the week. Enjoy the weekend folks - I'm certainly going to!

Foxy out.

Bathtime for Gideon.

THE best analogy I've heard for our economy is that the national debt is like a bath filled with water, and the deficit is like leaving the taps on.

The spending cuts the Coalition has made - the warships scrapped, the coppers sacked, the day care centres closed - amount to trying to empty that bath with an egg cup.

And today we're told that the economy has flatlined at 0.2% growth, which is barely within shouting distance of what the Government predicted and which Gideon was praying for.

Gideon has blamed it on the Royal Wedding and the 12-day holiday most of us took. The last time there was a problem with figures he blamed it on the snow. Next time, I expect, he'll point the finger at Andy Coulson or not getting enough greens or, I don't know, the wrong kind of sunshine.

When the wedding was announced it was going to boost tourism and bring in millions of pounds. Heston's trifle sold out at Waitrose, the plastic flag factories went into overdrive, and didn't Wills and Kate look happy?

Trouble is, the flag factories were in China, trifle is never going to shore up a nation's finances and happiness is free. So those taps are still on, Vodafone, Google and Sir Philip Green still pay their taxes abroad, and now Gideon's sacked a shedload of people there's more claiming benefits and fewer with cash to spend.

The Royal Wedding was like Gideon jumping into that bath, splashing around for a bit with his yellow duckie, and then wondering why the floor is wet.

In the meantime, gas has gone up 18%, around £6bn was taken out of the economy by the spending cuts, the wedding probably cost us another £3bn and next year's Olympics are shaping up to be a bloody expensive trip to the gym.

I'm no economist but a blind man can see that we're in the shit. Everything - and I mean everything - Gideon has done, from more tax on North Sea oil to cancelling defence contracts which provide the only jobs available in some parts of the country, has been a disaster. He won't cut VAT, which would get spending up, and the only job he's created was for Coulson - a decision which has so far cost 500 jobs, closed a £160m newspaper and may even bring down the Government.

I had expected so much more of a 2:1 history graduate and career politician with the face of an 18th Century French aristocrat whose defining achievement in life, at the age of 40, is that he changed his name because it didn't sound Prime Ministerial enough.

I had expected he'd screw things up over several years, rather than just the one. Now, can anyone explain why he's still in a job?

Keeps him off the streets, I suppose.