Goveller’s Travels

August 26th

The diversions of the court of Lilliput described.

My good behaviour had gained so far that I began to conceive hopes of getting my liberty and I took all possible methods to cultivate this favourable disposition with the natives. I would

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sometimes let five or six of them be racist on my hand; or venture to let them play spot a scrounger from the vantage of my hair. And when these Lilliputian porkflakes got upset about a program change at a flag-waving pantomime none of them went to, I consoled them. This

Last Night of The Proms, a hamboree completely at odds with the seventy concerts preceding it, had the lyrics of two of its numbers dropped; the first, a nuanced caper about Lilliputians ruling the waves with an invisible ferry fleet, and second, an unrecognisable Land of Hope

and Glory whose witless confrontations were so crass even the tune’s composer disavowed it. Trained in this art of outrage from their youth, I made a good progress in understanding and speaking their language of confected rage, and made extensive notes on the divergence between

this sudden epidemic of anxiety over cultural vandalism, and the deafening silence when their artistic institutions near went to the wall during Minister for Insignificance Oliver Dowden’s time in the shitness protection program. And as swathes of this bonsai bedlam burned,

corpses piled up from plague, and fears of a no-deal Liliprexit derived economic collapse grew larger, it did occur to me that the contrived distress was a symptom of calcifying mediocrity. Yet had I unfolded to the rabble of clotted minims in my palm that music needn’t be a once

a year nostalgia rally, but something that freed the soul to soar far beyond the misapprehensions of such life-sapping spinanity, I feared my bid for freedom would have been thwarted. By which the reader may conceive an idea of the wit of these little people: Tice, Bridgen,

Young, Oakeshott, Grimes, Farage and the rest; that the prudent economy of their minds was so vulnerable to ambiguity, their very identity rose and fell on the crests of imaginary waves. So I placed them gently down, drew breath, and yelled: 'NOBODY CARES APART FROM YOU'

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